carborundum
Adventurer
Yikes, and Yucks!
Sagiro's Story Hour: The FINAL Adventures of Abernathy's Company (FINISHED 7/3/14)
- Thread starter Sagiro
- Start date
HavokReaker
First Post
"two parents" indeed!
steeldragons
Steeliest of the dragons
NOTE: I am not caught up on the thread, so I'm sure this has been answered/talked about already...but for my two coppers:
My understanding of the "what's in Dranko's head" is a Far Realms being...but isn't it what was referred to in previous adventures as a "Cleaner"?
Tapheon is near-omnipotent...on his home plane...but the "what's in Dranko's head" can erase that plane (and everything/one in it) from existence. I would have been right on Tapheon's side, namely, "Get that thing the FRAG OUTTA HERE! Go back to your plane -or ANY other plane, for that matter!"
I think it was brilliantly done/played (by both Sagiro and PC. Not surprising, in the least, for any of us loyal readers, I'm sure.) But I didn't question Tapheon's reaction in the slightest. That said, my entire interpretation could be wrong. I have 4 pages of posts to get through to find out. [YAY!
]Typo: "went," not "want."
Coolest line Ernie's ever had:
Just out of curiosity --
-- what is Flicker's weapon? The other night I was re-reading the Collected at the part where he gets a pair of +5 returning daggers from the hoarde of Azhant the Ancient. Does he still use those?
Coolest line Ernie's ever had:
Sagiro said:
Just out of curiosity --
Sagiro said:
-- what is Flicker's weapon? The other night I was re-reading the Collected at the part where he gets a pair of +5 returning daggers from the hoarde of Azhant the Ancient. Does he still use those?
Last edited:
Same thing. But what's in his head is not a Cleaner. It's some piece of knowledge or information.
steeldragons said:
I find it very unlikely that something like the erasal of a plane of existence would or could come into play here. This is a campaign in which the gods, their spheres and their portfolios are clearly delineated. (When the god of death was no longer taking souls, people couldn't move on; when Aravis died, cats mourned for him; if we erase a hell dimension, completely irrelevant strands of story would have to be mentioned or dealt with, i.e., Abernia becomes overcrowded with evil souls who now can't go to hell -- it's nothing to do with the endgame of the campaign.) Paradoxes would quickly multiply, leaving you with only a poor storytelling device. Nor do we know that the thing in Dranko's brain could effect such a thing. We don't know what it does: nor did Tapheon. He was terrified of something he couldn't comprehend. That's the point.
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 387
Journey to the Center of the Earth
The area-of-effect spells have left their usual swaths of darkness where the light-motes have been wiped out. Before they can redistribute themselves, Dranko asks Grey Wolf to cast invisibility on him, while he stands in an area of darkness. Sure enough, Dranko gets about thirty seconds of useful invisibility before the motes drift close enough to swarm and illuminate him. Good to know.
The baby worms are not Essence-tainted like their parents, but the Company kills them anyway, to make sure they don’t become a threat to anyone later on.
Kibi can sense that they are very close to Leaping Circle Nine; maybe a couple more hours, if the tunnel doesn’t veer. It remains smooth and wide, and wider than the purple worms they just fought. Are there bigger worms? Or do they chew themselves larger tunnels over time? They hope it’s that second one.
The repellant heat of Essence recedes behind them, though the tunnel still stinks of purple worm. Just over two hours later the tunnel rises, bends, and there’s a small hole in the elbow, the size of a grapefruit. Find the path indicates they should go through that hole. Dranko peers through it, and sees a constructed hemispherical chamber with a hundred-foot-diameter metal Leaping Circle set into the floor. The purple worms must have clipped the very edge of the chamber with their own tunnel.
Dranko goes in first, wind walking, to scout for traps. The ring is magical, but that’s no surprise. This one has a large instruction plaque that, unlike the last one, is whole and mostly undamaged. It’s made of adamantium, and there are some light scratches over the first couple of words, as though the Evil Trio thought about trying to obscure the rituals but quickly gave up. Dranko licks the plaque, and it tastes like cold metal. Ever suspicious, he casts know age upon it, and it’s hundreds of years old.
Once he’s satisfied there are no nasty surprises waiting, the others waft into the room. The wizards inspect the instruction plaque. It’s simpler and more straightforward than the others, and the ritual should only take a day and half, with a single 10-hour gap in the middle when the circle must remain vacant. The second half of the ritual is identical to the first half. It all seems so easy!
“There’s clearly a trap here,” says Aravis. Kibi nods agreement, unwilling to accept any stroke of luck at face value. Flicker spends a few minutes combing over every square inch of everything, and finds nothing.
Aravis performs the ritual, though perhaps burdened by overconfidence, has a little trouble at the beginning. Kibi and Grey Wolf notice he’s speeding up a bit, and motion for him to slow down. Once settled, he aces the remainder of the first day’s casting.
That leaves them with ten hours of downtime. They decide instead to take two months, activating the timeless demiplane of Cayyat and nipping inside for a few weeks of R&R. (The practical reason they choose this course, is so that Galdifain can have the time to prep her spells, to bind the next powerful monster they encounter.)
The little goblinoid creature Gibbil is there, pleasant as ever, and entirely incognizant that he had previously turned into a hostile dragon. They ask him to cook something without mushrooms.
“I can prepare you a steak,” he says.
Dranko glances at Galdifain. “Don’t mention ‘steak’ around her,” he whispers.
/*/
The Company spends a relaxing couple of months, crafting some magic items but also enjoying dips in the lake and sunlit naps on the lodge’s long wooden deck. Galdifain commandeers half of Cayyat’s lab equipment on day one, moves it to a private workshop, and is seldom seen afterward except during meals.
Over dinner one night, Drano asks her how she bound the Thousandfold.
“I studied it for eight years,” she says. “I didn’t see it until the moment I bound it, but by then I had read every historical record of the creature, studied everything ever written about it. Eight years.”
“You know we killed it in about two minutes.”
“Yes, I know.”
“How does something like that even get born?” Dranko asks.
“It wasn’t,” says Galdifain. “It was, ironically, created to be a tool of assassination, by the greatest wizard of a world different from yours. You would not have heard of her, but her name was Mannix. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work. I am doing experimental research and fear I will run out of time.”
By the time their two-month hiatus is over, Galdifain is guardedly optimistic. She has altered the wording on her binding scroll such that she can bind a monster with much less study that is usual, though it won’t work on anything so powerful as an Anaxim or the Thousandfold. She’s not certain it will work at all, but shrugs her shoulders. “I’ve done my best.”
They exit Cayyat just before bedtime. The Leaping Circle chamber is as they left it, which is not surprising since they’ve been gone for about a second. As the ritual needs a ten-hour gap, Aravis makes them a mansion and they sleep.
Aravis awakes the next morning having had a vision from Belshikun in the Maze.
“I’m not going first. Skulg, you go first.”
One orc turns to another. “Like hell! Braygle should go first. I’ve got rank!”
A smaller, trembling orc shakes his head. “No way. Gezz, you’re the sergeant. And Lord Rekkeret gave you the order, not me. ‘Wait ten minutes, then follow. Or come sooner if you hear the sounds of battle.’ We’ll follow. We’ll follow you.”
Gezz snarls at his task force: a hundred orcs, crouching, hiding in a half-assed way in the trees surrounding a clearing in the woods, waiting for a signal. “Look, you miserable maggots. Rekkeret’s one of the boss’s boys, and he could personally kill every last one of those louse-ridden bandits without breaking a sweat. Chances are, we’ll be mopping up women and children and eating their sheep before the sun goes down. But they’ve proven more resilient that anyone thought, and they’ve been harassing our forces for a week, so Mr. Bloody Plate Mail picked us to be his backup. If it comes to it, and we have to fight, anyone who I think isn’t eagerly hitting the front line is going to have his ears handed to him tonight.”
Skulg, a misshapen orc with a scarred snout, shakes his head. “But what about the rumors? You know, that they’ve got the…”
“Shut up!” yells Gezz. “That’s just a rumor. Any of you utters his name where I can hear it, and I’ll have your tongues on a spit. Do you unders…”
He is interrupted by the sound of someone approaching through the dense forest.
“You see?” says Gezz. “Rekkeret’s already back. He and his men probably killed a few dozen of them, and he wants us to get some sport in so we don’t get bored. Skulg! Get your orcs ready! Klagg! Tell your…”
Something flies into their clearing and lands with a clanging thud on the ground. All of the orcs grow quiet, and stare, horrified. It’s a severed human head, still wearing its blood-red helmet.
“Rekkeret,” breathes Gezz. His hundred orcs are now straining to see through the trees on the far side of the clearing, and most of them are backing up nervously. Then one orc near the front points a shaking finger at a humanoid form emerging on the opposite edge.
“It’s him!” he shouts, heedless of the fate of his tongue. “It’s the Uktul Kan!”
Soon the panicked shout of “Uktul Kan!” is ripping through the orcs, and Gezz is helpless to stop their frenzied retreat.
The others have to explain to Aravis that “Uktul Kan” is orcish for “Pale Giant,” and was a nickname given to Tor after he nearly single-handedly wiped out a squad of orcs in one of their earliest adventures. It seems his legend never stopped growing, and that Tor’s skill as a warrior kept pace with it.
Aravis completes the second half of the ritual, and as he nears its conclusion, the others join him in the circle. In the final second before they hop, Morningstar feels Laramon’s Jade Clover heat rapidly in her pocket, just as it had before going through Leaping Circle One.
She has little time to ponder this. They Leap.
For each member of the Company, there is an immediate sensation of being squeezed, followed by varying amounts of pain. Morningstar feels the Jade Clover emit a final burst of heat, and then finds she is wedged into a space barely big enough to contain her, arms pinned to her side, rock pressing against her face. Her enclosure is keeping her mostly upright, though her left foot is not touching the ground. She tilts her head down and sees the top of Grey Wolf’s head just grazing her right foot.
There is a hurried conference over the mind-link. All of them are in similar straits, arranged in a vertical stack, jammed into a single long crevice, a gruesome human totem-pole. Grey Wolf’s elbow is broken; there wasn’t enough space for his body to arrive safely, and his arm ended up bent back, snapped like a stick. He can’t reach Bostock’s hilt to heal himself; he can’t move at all.
Flicker is not responding to the others’ thoughts. Dranko thinks he sees Flicker beneath his own feet; the little halfling arrived at the bottom of the stack, and from what Dranko can see with his darkvision, there wasn’t enough room for Flicker’s body. His legs must either be embedded into the rock, or compressed into a space the size of loaf of bread. Dranko has one healing spell he can cast without moving: close wounds, which should keep Flicker alive, briefly, while they figure out what to do.
Kibi knows where they were supposed to arrive, and this isn’t it. They aren’t anywhere close. He casts about with his earth-attuned senses, and his best guess is that there is nothing but solid stone for at least fifty miles in every direction. Scree sinks into the rock to scout and agrees with Kibi’s assessment. But by an amazing stroke of luck, they have arrived in the one tiny fissure where they wouldn’t all be instantly killed.
“How did we end up here?” thinks Ernie. “What happened to the ritual?”
“Seven Dark Words must have sabotaged it somehow,” says Aravis.
“Right now we need to figure out how we’re getting out of this,” thinks Dranko. “Flicker’s not going to live much longer.”
Kibi has an old magic item in his pocket – a bead of stillness that allows him to cast any spell, once, without moving. Unable to move his arms enough to cast, he uses that bead to effect stone shape, hollowing out the stone around him and his proximate friends enough to give them a little more range of motion. Aravis, near the top of the stack, uses this extra freedom to cast magnificent mansion. With great difficulty over fifteen minutes they wriggle upward, one by own falling into the magical doorway. Flicker has to be hauled in unconscious; his legs are indeed a gruesome sight. Morningstar heals him at once while Ernie tends to Grey Wolf’s arm.
They collapse in the foyer, each lying on the ground, panting from exertion and recovering from the claustrophobic horror of the moment.
“Son of a bitch!” says Dranko.
Ernie sits up. “Just when I thought I couldn’t hate them more, I hate them even more. I want to kill them, resurrect them, and kill them again!”
Grey Wolf ponders the ritual itself. “It’s possible that Seven Dark Words altered the ritual just enough that it sent us someplace random.”
“But how?” complains Dranko. “The instruction plaque was made of adamant, and it was the original plaque; I cast know age, remember?”
“You also licked it,” says Flicker, rubbing his legs. “Did it taste tampered with?”
The main difficulty they face, of course, is that they’re hundreds of miles from anywhere, deep in the center of Abernia, effectively buried alive. After a brief discussion, they decide they have but one option. Kibi will reset reality, using the power granted him by Abernia. The only logistical hurdle is that his power will work best if all his friends are in contact with him, and the narrow crevice would preclude such a formation. But that is a hurdle easily cleared; Kibi exits the mansion and immediately casts another couple of stone shapes, reforming the fissure into a space more comfortable for standing in a group.
Unlike the others, he quite likes it here, in this little pocket of stony solitude. It’s like being folded into a warm, comfortable blanket. He almost fancies he can hear the whispers of the world.
The others follow once he’s ready. Everyone puts their hands on his broad shoulders.
“Abernia,” he says quietly. “I’m here. I have a request. We didn’t mean to end up here. Can you please take us back to where we came from? Oh, and if you have some way of getting a message to Tor, saying ‘thank you,’ we’d appreciate it.”
There is a tremor in the earth, and small flakes of rock break off of the walls around them. Energy wells up around Kibi, supplying him with power, or perhaps he is supplying the power himself, he cannot tell. His sense of time distorts, wonderfully. For a heartbeat, all times are the same to him, past, present and future blending into one. He almost feels as though he could move freely through time, as easily as he now can slide through the earth.
But not yet. Time yanks on all of them, rewinding itself. Each member of the Company experiences the last few minutes of their lives, lived in reverse. They are back in the mansion, then out of it, squeezed, crushed, then the Leap backward into the ritual chamber, Aravis speaking nonsense, accelerated. Just as he reaches the beginning of the ritual, time snaps back to normal. The room is shaking, as if a small temblor is fading out.
They have not yet travelled, yet somehow they retain memories of their ill-fated journey.
“Thank you,” Kibi whispers.
“That was… kind of… neat,” says Dranko, disoriented.
Aravis is furious at being tricked by Seven Dark Words. Whatever magics they used to sabotage the Leaping Circle, he’s going to sweep them away. He casts disjunction, brushing aside worries that he might destroy the Leaping Circle itself with the knowledge that Kibi could simply rewind time again. His spell blasts outward from the instruction plaque, and he watches it carefully, to see what spells get stripped away.
There were only two. One was a minor dweomer of undetectable aura, that prevented the second spell from showing up to detect magic. The second was a simple illusion, paper thin, exactly the size and shape of the instruction tablet, covering it with a false set of instructions for the ritual. It had only a visual component, and so went undetected both by Dranko’s tongue and his know age spell.
“That was very clever,” says Kibi with a sigh.
Aravis approaches the tablet. The actual instructions are lengthy and complicated; it will take four days to enact, and require all three wizards.
“It seemed too easy because it was too easy,” he sighs.
“Hooray!” says Dranko. “We sprung the trap!”
/*/
The ritual is designed to allow the casters to sleep in shifts over its four-day duration. During Aravis’s first rest break, he sleeps, and he dreams.
“Fire!”
A volley of three-hundred seventy-six arrows soars upward.
Two hundred fifty-five miss their target. One hundred twenty-one strike and rebound harmlessly away. None have made a whit of difference.
Azhant the Ancient sweeps down over the city of Hydra, the last major city before the Balani Peninsula. He grabs two archers from the top of the northeast tower and idly shatters one of the few remaining ballistae with a contemptuous flick of his tail.
Fires burn here and there throughout the city, where the dragon’s breath has set it alight. The great garden park in the city’s center is rimed over with frost and icicles, and dotted with the frozen corpses of passersby who had been taken unaware by the dragon’s initial assault. Everywhere, men and women are running in terror, ducking into buildings or shrieking in the streets.
Four nervous looking wizards stand on the north-west tower. When Azhant’s next pass takes him close, the wizards fire off the best of their meager arcane arsenal: two lightning bolts, a fireball, and a cone of cold. All of them are negated by the dragon’s anti-magic. Seeing their failure the wizards try to retreat back into the tower interior; two make it, but the remaining pair are roasted by another gout of hellfire from the dragon’s jaws.
“Where are your heroes!” roars Azhant. “This is child’s play! Is there no one here to challenge me? Will I be obliged to leave twenty cities in ruins before someone worthy decides to peek out from beneath his bed?”
In Hydra, at least, there is no one. An hour later the city is largely destroyed or aflame, its walls and towers laid low by the might of the Azhant the Ancient. Satisfied, he takes high to the air and heads northward, following the Saph River toward his next target, the city of Storin.
So much for pleasant visions.
“When we get home,” says Ernie angrily, “we’re going to kick your ass again.” He shakes his fist at the ceiling.
“If we get out of here,” adds Morningstar, “I’m going to Slay Again.”
/*/
After four days the wizards finish the ritual, confident that they are not triggering any new traps. As the dust motes fade at the end of the day, the Company gathers in the circle, and they Leap.
In the dark, dizzying star-space, the voices whisper to Dranko. “Do not become!”
“I’m not going to!” answers Dranko. “I know what it’s like. It’s a pain in the ass!”
“Try harder!” snarls one of the unseen creatures, its voice close in his ear.
“Is there a particular way to Not Become?” he asks it.
“Stay your ambition.”
“Dammit!”
They arrive. It is the dust-mote equivalent of dusk. They stand in something akin to a field, the stone floor a gentle ramp that slopes both upward and downward out of their range of vision. The walls and ceiling are far enough away to also be out of view, though the ceiling is supported here and there by natural stone pillars.
The ground is covered with artistically-arranged rows of fungus. A thin film of water coats the ground, slowly sluicing downward, watering the crops.
“It’s a farm,” says Ernie. He takes care not to tread on the fungus.
Morningstar casts true seeing, and all is as it seems. Kibi takes a moment to gather his bearings, and decides they are where Corriv’s equations predicted: 0.8 miles coreward and 97 miles removed laterally from Leaping Circle Nine. The next (and final?) Leaping Circle is another mile below them, and fifty miles away nearly due south.
Aravis creates a mansion for them to sleep in, though before they retire, they enjoy the magical feast of entirely non-fungus-based foods. That night he dreams once again, but though this is another vision granted by Belshikun, it is not from the surface of Abernia. He is seeing into someplace else, someplace unique.
The two of them, a man and a woman side by side, watch an enormous red moon rise over a strange sea. They sit on a beach of smooth blue stones, stones that might be solid and might not be, and listen to the slow susurrus of the waves, waves that both are and are not water, waves that both are, and are not.
“I think I’m ready to go back,” says the woman.
For a long time, the man says nothing. Then: “I wonder how long we’ve been here. Time isn’t passing, the way we remember it. It’s like someone had to invent time for us, and wasn’t quite sure how it worked.”
“I guess,” says the woman. “But I don’t think that matters. We fell out of the universe, and here we are, waiting, doing nothing. I think we’ve been watching the ocean for years now. Haven’t we had this conversation hundreds of times?”
“I think so,” says the man. “But how can we be sure? Have we always known, or did we figure it out over centuries? That sometimes things come loose?. It probably happens in many ways, all unique. The universe didn’t have a way to deal with paradoxes, so it created this place, for us wayward bits of flotsam to find purchase, instead of puncturing holes in reality.”
“But something has changed,” says the woman. “Can you feel it? I think it’s time to leave. The universe will let us back in. It wants us to go back. All we have to do is ask.”
Again the man is quiet for a time. “I’m not sure I want to go back,” he says. “I think terrible things happened to me there, and will probably happen again. It’s not so bad here. Here, I can think my own thoughts.”
“We can’t stay here forever,” says the woman.
“Why not?” asks the man, calmly.
“Because we’re meant to go back,” says the woman. “I know it sounds silly, but after all this time, why do we only now feel it’s even possible to go back? I think it’s because the universe is kicking us out. Like we’ve overstayed our welcome, or that this place is going to disappear, and we’ll be destroyed if we’re still here.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad, either,” says the man.
“Grow up!” says the woman with sudden vehemence. “You can go back and make a difference! You can help those who helped you. And if you get destroyed in the process, you’ll be no worse off, and maybe you’ll have done some good in the end. I saw all of my friends die you know, over and over again, and each time I knew at the end that we’d failed, at that the whole world – whichever world it was – was screwed. So don’t play the ‘terrible things,’ card with me.”
The man gives her a wry smile. “I suppose you’re right. I should go back. We should go back.”
“Good,” says the woman. “And all we have to do is make the decision, and the universe will put us where we belong, wherever that is. It’s time for time to start passing for us again.”
And beneath a night sky made of nothing, in the light of a moon that will soon cease to be, Kay and Sagiro get to their feet.
…to be continued…
Journey to the Center of the Earth
The area-of-effect spells have left their usual swaths of darkness where the light-motes have been wiped out. Before they can redistribute themselves, Dranko asks Grey Wolf to cast invisibility on him, while he stands in an area of darkness. Sure enough, Dranko gets about thirty seconds of useful invisibility before the motes drift close enough to swarm and illuminate him. Good to know.
The baby worms are not Essence-tainted like their parents, but the Company kills them anyway, to make sure they don’t become a threat to anyone later on.
Kibi can sense that they are very close to Leaping Circle Nine; maybe a couple more hours, if the tunnel doesn’t veer. It remains smooth and wide, and wider than the purple worms they just fought. Are there bigger worms? Or do they chew themselves larger tunnels over time? They hope it’s that second one.
The repellant heat of Essence recedes behind them, though the tunnel still stinks of purple worm. Just over two hours later the tunnel rises, bends, and there’s a small hole in the elbow, the size of a grapefruit. Find the path indicates they should go through that hole. Dranko peers through it, and sees a constructed hemispherical chamber with a hundred-foot-diameter metal Leaping Circle set into the floor. The purple worms must have clipped the very edge of the chamber with their own tunnel.
Dranko goes in first, wind walking, to scout for traps. The ring is magical, but that’s no surprise. This one has a large instruction plaque that, unlike the last one, is whole and mostly undamaged. It’s made of adamantium, and there are some light scratches over the first couple of words, as though the Evil Trio thought about trying to obscure the rituals but quickly gave up. Dranko licks the plaque, and it tastes like cold metal. Ever suspicious, he casts know age upon it, and it’s hundreds of years old.
Once he’s satisfied there are no nasty surprises waiting, the others waft into the room. The wizards inspect the instruction plaque. It’s simpler and more straightforward than the others, and the ritual should only take a day and half, with a single 10-hour gap in the middle when the circle must remain vacant. The second half of the ritual is identical to the first half. It all seems so easy!
“There’s clearly a trap here,” says Aravis. Kibi nods agreement, unwilling to accept any stroke of luck at face value. Flicker spends a few minutes combing over every square inch of everything, and finds nothing.
Aravis performs the ritual, though perhaps burdened by overconfidence, has a little trouble at the beginning. Kibi and Grey Wolf notice he’s speeding up a bit, and motion for him to slow down. Once settled, he aces the remainder of the first day’s casting.
That leaves them with ten hours of downtime. They decide instead to take two months, activating the timeless demiplane of Cayyat and nipping inside for a few weeks of R&R. (The practical reason they choose this course, is so that Galdifain can have the time to prep her spells, to bind the next powerful monster they encounter.)
The little goblinoid creature Gibbil is there, pleasant as ever, and entirely incognizant that he had previously turned into a hostile dragon. They ask him to cook something without mushrooms.
“I can prepare you a steak,” he says.
Dranko glances at Galdifain. “Don’t mention ‘steak’ around her,” he whispers.
/*/
The Company spends a relaxing couple of months, crafting some magic items but also enjoying dips in the lake and sunlit naps on the lodge’s long wooden deck. Galdifain commandeers half of Cayyat’s lab equipment on day one, moves it to a private workshop, and is seldom seen afterward except during meals.
Over dinner one night, Drano asks her how she bound the Thousandfold.
“I studied it for eight years,” she says. “I didn’t see it until the moment I bound it, but by then I had read every historical record of the creature, studied everything ever written about it. Eight years.”
“You know we killed it in about two minutes.”
“Yes, I know.”
“How does something like that even get born?” Dranko asks.
“It wasn’t,” says Galdifain. “It was, ironically, created to be a tool of assassination, by the greatest wizard of a world different from yours. You would not have heard of her, but her name was Mannix. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work. I am doing experimental research and fear I will run out of time.”
By the time their two-month hiatus is over, Galdifain is guardedly optimistic. She has altered the wording on her binding scroll such that she can bind a monster with much less study that is usual, though it won’t work on anything so powerful as an Anaxim or the Thousandfold. She’s not certain it will work at all, but shrugs her shoulders. “I’ve done my best.”
They exit Cayyat just before bedtime. The Leaping Circle chamber is as they left it, which is not surprising since they’ve been gone for about a second. As the ritual needs a ten-hour gap, Aravis makes them a mansion and they sleep.
Aravis awakes the next morning having had a vision from Belshikun in the Maze.
“I’m not going first. Skulg, you go first.”
One orc turns to another. “Like hell! Braygle should go first. I’ve got rank!”
A smaller, trembling orc shakes his head. “No way. Gezz, you’re the sergeant. And Lord Rekkeret gave you the order, not me. ‘Wait ten minutes, then follow. Or come sooner if you hear the sounds of battle.’ We’ll follow. We’ll follow you.”
Gezz snarls at his task force: a hundred orcs, crouching, hiding in a half-assed way in the trees surrounding a clearing in the woods, waiting for a signal. “Look, you miserable maggots. Rekkeret’s one of the boss’s boys, and he could personally kill every last one of those louse-ridden bandits without breaking a sweat. Chances are, we’ll be mopping up women and children and eating their sheep before the sun goes down. But they’ve proven more resilient that anyone thought, and they’ve been harassing our forces for a week, so Mr. Bloody Plate Mail picked us to be his backup. If it comes to it, and we have to fight, anyone who I think isn’t eagerly hitting the front line is going to have his ears handed to him tonight.”
Skulg, a misshapen orc with a scarred snout, shakes his head. “But what about the rumors? You know, that they’ve got the…”
“Shut up!” yells Gezz. “That’s just a rumor. Any of you utters his name where I can hear it, and I’ll have your tongues on a spit. Do you unders…”
He is interrupted by the sound of someone approaching through the dense forest.
“You see?” says Gezz. “Rekkeret’s already back. He and his men probably killed a few dozen of them, and he wants us to get some sport in so we don’t get bored. Skulg! Get your orcs ready! Klagg! Tell your…”
Something flies into their clearing and lands with a clanging thud on the ground. All of the orcs grow quiet, and stare, horrified. It’s a severed human head, still wearing its blood-red helmet.
“Rekkeret,” breathes Gezz. His hundred orcs are now straining to see through the trees on the far side of the clearing, and most of them are backing up nervously. Then one orc near the front points a shaking finger at a humanoid form emerging on the opposite edge.
“It’s him!” he shouts, heedless of the fate of his tongue. “It’s the Uktul Kan!”
Soon the panicked shout of “Uktul Kan!” is ripping through the orcs, and Gezz is helpless to stop their frenzied retreat.
The others have to explain to Aravis that “Uktul Kan” is orcish for “Pale Giant,” and was a nickname given to Tor after he nearly single-handedly wiped out a squad of orcs in one of their earliest adventures. It seems his legend never stopped growing, and that Tor’s skill as a warrior kept pace with it.
Aravis completes the second half of the ritual, and as he nears its conclusion, the others join him in the circle. In the final second before they hop, Morningstar feels Laramon’s Jade Clover heat rapidly in her pocket, just as it had before going through Leaping Circle One.
She has little time to ponder this. They Leap.
For each member of the Company, there is an immediate sensation of being squeezed, followed by varying amounts of pain. Morningstar feels the Jade Clover emit a final burst of heat, and then finds she is wedged into a space barely big enough to contain her, arms pinned to her side, rock pressing against her face. Her enclosure is keeping her mostly upright, though her left foot is not touching the ground. She tilts her head down and sees the top of Grey Wolf’s head just grazing her right foot.
There is a hurried conference over the mind-link. All of them are in similar straits, arranged in a vertical stack, jammed into a single long crevice, a gruesome human totem-pole. Grey Wolf’s elbow is broken; there wasn’t enough space for his body to arrive safely, and his arm ended up bent back, snapped like a stick. He can’t reach Bostock’s hilt to heal himself; he can’t move at all.
Flicker is not responding to the others’ thoughts. Dranko thinks he sees Flicker beneath his own feet; the little halfling arrived at the bottom of the stack, and from what Dranko can see with his darkvision, there wasn’t enough room for Flicker’s body. His legs must either be embedded into the rock, or compressed into a space the size of loaf of bread. Dranko has one healing spell he can cast without moving: close wounds, which should keep Flicker alive, briefly, while they figure out what to do.
Kibi knows where they were supposed to arrive, and this isn’t it. They aren’t anywhere close. He casts about with his earth-attuned senses, and his best guess is that there is nothing but solid stone for at least fifty miles in every direction. Scree sinks into the rock to scout and agrees with Kibi’s assessment. But by an amazing stroke of luck, they have arrived in the one tiny fissure where they wouldn’t all be instantly killed.
“How did we end up here?” thinks Ernie. “What happened to the ritual?”
“Seven Dark Words must have sabotaged it somehow,” says Aravis.
“Right now we need to figure out how we’re getting out of this,” thinks Dranko. “Flicker’s not going to live much longer.”
Kibi has an old magic item in his pocket – a bead of stillness that allows him to cast any spell, once, without moving. Unable to move his arms enough to cast, he uses that bead to effect stone shape, hollowing out the stone around him and his proximate friends enough to give them a little more range of motion. Aravis, near the top of the stack, uses this extra freedom to cast magnificent mansion. With great difficulty over fifteen minutes they wriggle upward, one by own falling into the magical doorway. Flicker has to be hauled in unconscious; his legs are indeed a gruesome sight. Morningstar heals him at once while Ernie tends to Grey Wolf’s arm.
They collapse in the foyer, each lying on the ground, panting from exertion and recovering from the claustrophobic horror of the moment.
“Son of a bitch!” says Dranko.
Ernie sits up. “Just when I thought I couldn’t hate them more, I hate them even more. I want to kill them, resurrect them, and kill them again!”
Grey Wolf ponders the ritual itself. “It’s possible that Seven Dark Words altered the ritual just enough that it sent us someplace random.”
“But how?” complains Dranko. “The instruction plaque was made of adamant, and it was the original plaque; I cast know age, remember?”
“You also licked it,” says Flicker, rubbing his legs. “Did it taste tampered with?”
The main difficulty they face, of course, is that they’re hundreds of miles from anywhere, deep in the center of Abernia, effectively buried alive. After a brief discussion, they decide they have but one option. Kibi will reset reality, using the power granted him by Abernia. The only logistical hurdle is that his power will work best if all his friends are in contact with him, and the narrow crevice would preclude such a formation. But that is a hurdle easily cleared; Kibi exits the mansion and immediately casts another couple of stone shapes, reforming the fissure into a space more comfortable for standing in a group.
Unlike the others, he quite likes it here, in this little pocket of stony solitude. It’s like being folded into a warm, comfortable blanket. He almost fancies he can hear the whispers of the world.
The others follow once he’s ready. Everyone puts their hands on his broad shoulders.
“Abernia,” he says quietly. “I’m here. I have a request. We didn’t mean to end up here. Can you please take us back to where we came from? Oh, and if you have some way of getting a message to Tor, saying ‘thank you,’ we’d appreciate it.”
There is a tremor in the earth, and small flakes of rock break off of the walls around them. Energy wells up around Kibi, supplying him with power, or perhaps he is supplying the power himself, he cannot tell. His sense of time distorts, wonderfully. For a heartbeat, all times are the same to him, past, present and future blending into one. He almost feels as though he could move freely through time, as easily as he now can slide through the earth.
But not yet. Time yanks on all of them, rewinding itself. Each member of the Company experiences the last few minutes of their lives, lived in reverse. They are back in the mansion, then out of it, squeezed, crushed, then the Leap backward into the ritual chamber, Aravis speaking nonsense, accelerated. Just as he reaches the beginning of the ritual, time snaps back to normal. The room is shaking, as if a small temblor is fading out.
They have not yet travelled, yet somehow they retain memories of their ill-fated journey.
“Thank you,” Kibi whispers.
“That was… kind of… neat,” says Dranko, disoriented.
Aravis is furious at being tricked by Seven Dark Words. Whatever magics they used to sabotage the Leaping Circle, he’s going to sweep them away. He casts disjunction, brushing aside worries that he might destroy the Leaping Circle itself with the knowledge that Kibi could simply rewind time again. His spell blasts outward from the instruction plaque, and he watches it carefully, to see what spells get stripped away.
There were only two. One was a minor dweomer of undetectable aura, that prevented the second spell from showing up to detect magic. The second was a simple illusion, paper thin, exactly the size and shape of the instruction tablet, covering it with a false set of instructions for the ritual. It had only a visual component, and so went undetected both by Dranko’s tongue and his know age spell.
“That was very clever,” says Kibi with a sigh.
Aravis approaches the tablet. The actual instructions are lengthy and complicated; it will take four days to enact, and require all three wizards.
“It seemed too easy because it was too easy,” he sighs.
“Hooray!” says Dranko. “We sprung the trap!”
/*/
The ritual is designed to allow the casters to sleep in shifts over its four-day duration. During Aravis’s first rest break, he sleeps, and he dreams.
“Fire!”
A volley of three-hundred seventy-six arrows soars upward.
Two hundred fifty-five miss their target. One hundred twenty-one strike and rebound harmlessly away. None have made a whit of difference.
Azhant the Ancient sweeps down over the city of Hydra, the last major city before the Balani Peninsula. He grabs two archers from the top of the northeast tower and idly shatters one of the few remaining ballistae with a contemptuous flick of his tail.
Fires burn here and there throughout the city, where the dragon’s breath has set it alight. The great garden park in the city’s center is rimed over with frost and icicles, and dotted with the frozen corpses of passersby who had been taken unaware by the dragon’s initial assault. Everywhere, men and women are running in terror, ducking into buildings or shrieking in the streets.
Four nervous looking wizards stand on the north-west tower. When Azhant’s next pass takes him close, the wizards fire off the best of their meager arcane arsenal: two lightning bolts, a fireball, and a cone of cold. All of them are negated by the dragon’s anti-magic. Seeing their failure the wizards try to retreat back into the tower interior; two make it, but the remaining pair are roasted by another gout of hellfire from the dragon’s jaws.
“Where are your heroes!” roars Azhant. “This is child’s play! Is there no one here to challenge me? Will I be obliged to leave twenty cities in ruins before someone worthy decides to peek out from beneath his bed?”
In Hydra, at least, there is no one. An hour later the city is largely destroyed or aflame, its walls and towers laid low by the might of the Azhant the Ancient. Satisfied, he takes high to the air and heads northward, following the Saph River toward his next target, the city of Storin.
So much for pleasant visions.
“When we get home,” says Ernie angrily, “we’re going to kick your ass again.” He shakes his fist at the ceiling.
“If we get out of here,” adds Morningstar, “I’m going to Slay Again.”
/*/
After four days the wizards finish the ritual, confident that they are not triggering any new traps. As the dust motes fade at the end of the day, the Company gathers in the circle, and they Leap.
In the dark, dizzying star-space, the voices whisper to Dranko. “Do not become!”
“I’m not going to!” answers Dranko. “I know what it’s like. It’s a pain in the ass!”
“Try harder!” snarls one of the unseen creatures, its voice close in his ear.
“Is there a particular way to Not Become?” he asks it.
“Stay your ambition.”
“Dammit!”
They arrive. It is the dust-mote equivalent of dusk. They stand in something akin to a field, the stone floor a gentle ramp that slopes both upward and downward out of their range of vision. The walls and ceiling are far enough away to also be out of view, though the ceiling is supported here and there by natural stone pillars.
The ground is covered with artistically-arranged rows of fungus. A thin film of water coats the ground, slowly sluicing downward, watering the crops.
“It’s a farm,” says Ernie. He takes care not to tread on the fungus.
Morningstar casts true seeing, and all is as it seems. Kibi takes a moment to gather his bearings, and decides they are where Corriv’s equations predicted: 0.8 miles coreward and 97 miles removed laterally from Leaping Circle Nine. The next (and final?) Leaping Circle is another mile below them, and fifty miles away nearly due south.
Aravis creates a mansion for them to sleep in, though before they retire, they enjoy the magical feast of entirely non-fungus-based foods. That night he dreams once again, but though this is another vision granted by Belshikun, it is not from the surface of Abernia. He is seeing into someplace else, someplace unique.
The two of them, a man and a woman side by side, watch an enormous red moon rise over a strange sea. They sit on a beach of smooth blue stones, stones that might be solid and might not be, and listen to the slow susurrus of the waves, waves that both are and are not water, waves that both are, and are not.
“I think I’m ready to go back,” says the woman.
For a long time, the man says nothing. Then: “I wonder how long we’ve been here. Time isn’t passing, the way we remember it. It’s like someone had to invent time for us, and wasn’t quite sure how it worked.”
“I guess,” says the woman. “But I don’t think that matters. We fell out of the universe, and here we are, waiting, doing nothing. I think we’ve been watching the ocean for years now. Haven’t we had this conversation hundreds of times?”
“I think so,” says the man. “But how can we be sure? Have we always known, or did we figure it out over centuries? That sometimes things come loose?. It probably happens in many ways, all unique. The universe didn’t have a way to deal with paradoxes, so it created this place, for us wayward bits of flotsam to find purchase, instead of puncturing holes in reality.”
“But something has changed,” says the woman. “Can you feel it? I think it’s time to leave. The universe will let us back in. It wants us to go back. All we have to do is ask.”
Again the man is quiet for a time. “I’m not sure I want to go back,” he says. “I think terrible things happened to me there, and will probably happen again. It’s not so bad here. Here, I can think my own thoughts.”
“We can’t stay here forever,” says the woman.
“Why not?” asks the man, calmly.
“Because we’re meant to go back,” says the woman. “I know it sounds silly, but after all this time, why do we only now feel it’s even possible to go back? I think it’s because the universe is kicking us out. Like we’ve overstayed our welcome, or that this place is going to disappear, and we’ll be destroyed if we’re still here.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad, either,” says the man.
“Grow up!” says the woman with sudden vehemence. “You can go back and make a difference! You can help those who helped you. And if you get destroyed in the process, you’ll be no worse off, and maybe you’ll have done some good in the end. I saw all of my friends die you know, over and over again, and each time I knew at the end that we’d failed, at that the whole world – whichever world it was – was screwed. So don’t play the ‘terrible things,’ card with me.”
The man gives her a wry smile. “I suppose you’re right. I should go back. We should go back.”
“Good,” says the woman. “And all we have to do is make the decision, and the universe will put us where we belong, wherever that is. It’s time for time to start passing for us again.”
And beneath a night sky made of nothing, in the light of a moon that will soon cease to be, Kay and Sagiro get to their feet.
…to be continued…
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