Tag: mana

Military Service: Genocide or Treason

On By ravonlockeIn Journal, TristiaLeave a comment

We sink into the mire of military service. Ten hours of marching a day, under spells that make us go further than we should and longer than we ought. We are instructed to use as much mana as possible to stress test the device. Our first goal is Gainswood, and then on to the south. Dalish takes a turn on the machine, while Remy heads off to find Aranea.

When Remy gets back, he gathers us all up to talk. We have to destroy the machine, he insists. We have to do it in a way that doesn’t seem like sabotage, so they think the design is faulty. We discuss various transmutation options with Klyce. Using various spells to mask what he’s doing, so he can weaken the machine and then we can quickly destroy it. We decide to start in the morning.

Nat looks into our futures the next morning, just to see. She stop the plan in its tracks. Our plan is a Bad Idea. Simply blowing it up with fireballs, as suspected, is also a Bad Idea. Remy decides to try and have a chat with Lt. Colonel Durance. I really don’t understand why he thinks this will work, but it’s Remy. He goes to try.

He returns and gives the expected answer — do your job, and also, Durance has been spying on us, and heard the entire conversation last night. We’ll have to be more careful. Then it devolves into a political discussion about systems of oppression, and one being just like the others. Someone suggests turning everyone into mages, for equality and Dalish pipes up. He says he’s been feeding bits of flesh that used to be Garion to people and it gives them magic for a short while. What the hell, Dalish??? I don’t want to hear any more about this, and engage Nat in conversation about where her Grandmother’s caravan travels, and if Canada is nice this time of year. She brings up the darkness and the six stars, and we try to remember the names of all six gods from the cave so many months ago.

Nat decides to scry on her brother, but similar to my messaging, nothing goes through. She tries her parents, but quickly drops the spell, and doesn’t try anymore for a while. Then she tries a new spell, pulling us all inside her head for a chat. It’s super strange. Remy and Klyce do not have good time, but it could be useful later. Nat and Marybeth decide to dream together, so I sit up and keep watch for them. Marybeth does not seem to be having good dreams, but at least no one goes wandering off, and they both wake up in the morning.

Once we’ve been traveling for a while. Durance lets us know that the Mage Corp will be splitting off from the main force, and splitting up. He and the other three will be going after one target while the rest of us go aver Gainswood Plantation. Our orders are to assess their strength and determine if there are any mages. If there are, execute them. If there aren’t, just leave the troops and civilians alone. We are mage hunting, nothing more. In two weeks, we will meet up on the other side. The Majors will be in charge, and are expected to handle any disputes like well-reasoned adults. The mana tanker will be traveling with the main force while we’re on assignment. We will have forty soldiers in our detachment. We are to keep them safe.

We gather up and head out. Sargeant Clem is in charge of our soliders, and he seems reasonable enough. We march through hot, sticky, wet swamplands. It is awful, but I do my best to keep the wind moving for us. The first night, while on my watch, I hear things all around us. I shout for everyone to get up as zombies charge in. We keep them men out of the fight, the zombies are focused on us, and we don’t fancy getting shot, or losing any of the men. Marybeth falls in the fight, and before we can help her, darkness gathers round.

“Who dis who has trespassed in my swamp”? the darkness asks.

Ninjas, Betrayal, and Captives

On By ravonlockeIn Journal, TristiaLeave a comment

The screaming start immediately, and I am not the only one. Something has stabbed me in the side! I reach out to Alice to cast on her and myself, then fly up and the darkness receeds below me. There are two bubbles of darkness in the warehouse, and everyone stumbles back out into the lighted area. Projectiles come flying out of the darkness, embedding themselves in my flesh and I fly straight back out of the building entirely.

Most of the others join me, but not for long. Remy goes charging back in to save Alice and Francine. Gerhardt sends a message to Maribeth (and Klyce) that we’ve been attacked. Then everyone is back inside, except for me, flying above the street and bleeding all over dirt below.

It isn’t long before I see Klyce and Maribeth approaching on ghostly steeds. I waves and fly up and down until they see me. I explain that everything went dark inside and then someone started stabbing us, and they head right on inside. They were with Poissant and told him before then rushed to us, so I continue staying outside, still bleeding, to wait for him.

It isn’t long, though, before the darkness is gone. I carefully re-enter the building, but the fight is over, and somehow Nat is inside. Alice is still there, but Francine has been killed, and one of the attackers has been decapitated. The others are saying something to Gerhardt about a dog? Remy takes a look at the dead man and finds scarred flesh on his back and hands.

Klyce tells Gerhardt that they need to talk about killing and then Remy gets into it with him. Klyce Will Not condone murder, even in self-defence, and Remy feels it’s justified to kill someone trying to kill you. Things get heated until Remy storms out. Klyce asks if any of the rest of us want to object to a no killing people rule, and we all demure.

It’s at this point that Klein finally arrives. We turn on him about everything that’s been going on, and all his staff who have been murdered. He goes on about how he went to Xing and studied their legends of an immortal emperor and the Woojen. (I really should ask someone how to spell that…) They were able to tap into raw mana without refining or consuming it. Klein found (Stole!) some relics that hinted at a path forward that we might take. When I ask about the thefts, he says there weren’t any Woojen left, as though that excuses it.

As he went on, Klyce asked if maybe they were like me. I don’t know, maybe, but it sounds like they knew what they were doing, maybe did it intentionally?

Klein offers to show us the relics. He claims that he doesn’t know what the killers want. Said he didn’t even know his people were being targeted. We tell him that we’re taking him out of here, and to gather his things and the relics, it’s not safe any more. They know where he is. He grabs a bunch of soil and rock samples, a staff covered in rules with a jade crystal on top, and some figurines. He has a small shrine, too, but it’s a bit much to be carrying across the city. Dalish sits for a few minutes and casts some magic on the staff. He says it’s a Staff of Withering, which sounds pretty horrible to me. We ask about the blood and meat and he says his rituals require it, but claims it isn’t blood magic.

We take him back over to our apartment, hoping that no one will be able to get in the magically sealed door. We set him up in the alchemy lab and he starts lecturing us, just like Malden used to. Why do we have to refine mana? Then launches into this crazy theory that the earth is a sphere of mana contained only by thin layers of rock and dirt. He says it’s at least thirty percent mana, but that it is kept in check and underground by the will of the planet! He claims that refining it breaks that bond to the world, and makes it usable by people. I mistakenly tell him I don’t need refined mana, can’t use it, and he gets Super interested. The rest have my back though. Nobody’s going to make Me a lab experiment.

We change the subject, back to our investigation. Did Greg tell him that he was going public with his complaints about the rituals? Klein has no idea what we’re talking about. Says everyone was happy to be working on the project. We ask what Else was going on at his lab, but he insists there was nothing. We tell him what the letter says, but he has no idea what would have been so upsetting and cost human diginity.

We all decide to go back to the lab to check it out. Maribeth doesn’t want to leave him alone, so she stays while the rest of us head out. Klyce and Dalish head to speak to LuBai, while Gerhardt, Nat and I go back to the lab. Remy still hasn’t come home. We find Poissant still at the lab, and start searching more carefully. Nat finds a secret door that has an arcane lock on it. She can’t pick the lock and Gerhardt and I can’t break down the door. Gerhardt sends a message to Klyce and he comes in swinging, knocking the door right off the hinges.

There are stairs down to another lab here. There are more samples like upstairs, but also a magical circle, and various unfriendly looking prods and probes. There are also strange glass circles pointed at the circle. When Dalish looks through one at Nat, he can see her skeletons and motes of mana floating around inside her. I step in front and Dalish says he can’t even see my bones, I’m just made up of mana!

The equipment down here looks a bit newer than upstairs. There are also empty filters and mana jugs. We find another lens that seems to slow down time in front of it and records what it sees. We fiddle with it until we can back up and see what it has recorded recently.

Greg comes down the stairs, picks up an iron flask, and a girl pops out. A Xingese girl about my age with glassy eyes. He tells her to sit down and then cooks and feeds her meat. Then he just puts her back inside the flask. What in the World??? We go back further and further. There are a lot of recordings of feeding this girl, always meat and only meat. A few recordings show her casting spells, the forms are strange but the results look normal. They run probes over her and even stick one in her once. There is one recording that shows the mana glass, and she’s just like me, full to the brim with mana. The flask isn’t down here, and it wasn’t with the stuff we took, either. The three dead men and Alice are the only ones on the recordings. Klein never comes down.

Alice. Klein. Maribeth!

We race home. Klein is unconscious on the floor. One of the rooms is painted in blood. Alice and Maribeth are both gone! I run around the mansion, calling for her. She Has to be here! She Has to!

I vaguely hear Gerhardt waking up Klein and demanding to know what happened. The ninjas came. Into our House!

Dalish tells him what we found, but he doesn’t believe us. He casts a spell on Dalish, but Dalish tells him the story again. Klein collapses on the floor again. Gerhardt tries to message Maribeth, but nothing happens. We move the unconscious Klein into the living room and try to decide what to do next.

Warped Time

On By ravonlockeIn Journal, TristiaLeave a comment

We proceeded to die, a lot. Over and over we played that same hour. We did learn from our mistakes, well, most of them. We didn’t get arrested again. We didn’t get crushed by a falling jail again. We did scare Cass a few more times. We did cause the explosion once or twice. And we didn’t find the Old Lady before she collapsed. But let me walk you through our next ten lives.

Round Two:

Going off what Cass had called us, we convince Officer Cross that we’re goblins, in search of food. He is suspicious, but lets us through. We head towards the center of the bubble, observing all the same things we did the first time around. The refinery isn’t quite at the center, and it is surrounded by very old trees and covered in thick spiderwebs.

Remy takes the guise of the pointy-ear people and wander off to ask questions. When he gets back, we head into webbed tunnels to get inside the refinery. In the main hall, we find overturned vats, broken catwalks. Klyce and Gerhardt hear something so we quietly scatter, but nothing happens. We eventually find an elevator and take it down. We land in a circular chamber with a reinforced steel door and an electric keypad lock. Dalish tries punching in some numbers and it starts beeping, so he cuts some wires. We are conscious of an explosion before everything goes white and the Old Lady frowns at us before we wake up in mossy dirt.

Round Three:

Convince Cross we’re goblins. Head through town. Into the refinery. Down the elevator.

Maribeth take a look at the keypad and notices there are four worn buttons. That’s still a ridiculous amount of combinations. Remy goes back outside to look for Cass. Maribeth takes on the Old Lady’s face and heads out to walk around a bit to see if anyone calls her by a name we can then ask about. No one does. When Remy comes back, he says he met a devil woman who will give him prophecy for blue crystals. She also told him that Cass is the small woman in the jail.

We head off to the jail to see if we can talk to Cass, but by the time we get there, she’s already broken out. We track her to a tree a little ways off, where she is rummaging through a hole a bit up the trunk. Maribeth tries to climb up to talk to her, but she kicks her away and then throws explosives at us. I shout at here it the fae language, and she replies in kind. I’m honestly too shocked to keep the conversation up. Remy casts sleep on her and Klyce climbs up and brings her down. I levitate her a bit as we carry her away from her explosives.

When she wakes up, she shrieks a lot, but we manage to calm her down eventually. Mostly by simply confusing her. We know she still goes in the mine, and ask about the code for the door at the bottom of the elevator ride. She gives it to us. We ask her about why she still goes down there. She insists there’s still enough mana down there to restart the economy, and she and the sherrif are trying to find it.

Then the ground falls again.

Round Four:

Goblins. Mine. Elevator. Door: 7233*. Door opens and we go in.

There are mine arts and rails, and not having a better idea, and being in a rush, we jump in and go for a ride. When we hit the end of the lin, there’s a locker room and another door. The lockers each have a wire leading from them to the door. The lockers are labled: Ermine, Uriel, Vasquez, Oscar, Lowell, Nott, Cassie, Boyland, Kenworth. We stare at them for a few minutes, until Klyce starts poking at the letters. Oh! I write down the first letter of each name and scramble them about a bit. UNLOCK – we open Uriel, Nott, Lowell, Oscar, Cassie, and Kenworth. The door opens.

There are more carts and rails here. And a tiny spider who hops over to a steel bin, and looks back at us. It’s a cute little spider, and Dalish goes to look in the bin. It’s full of meat. Dalish feeds it and it happily hops and climbs up onto his shoulder. Hm… Klyce puts the bin into one of the carts, just in case and we go for another ride.

About half way down, the first tremor hits. A crack opens up and thousands of spiders begin pouring out and giving chase to us. We immediately start throwing meat to them. When the bin is half empty, they’ve been left far behind. Thank goodness.

The end of this line looks like the main refinery room. There’s a large cavern with an arcane machine in the center. It reeks of mana to my sensitive friends. There is also a massive hole in the center of the room, about the size of our Sanctum pitch. There’s another arcane bubble in the hole, and looking inside is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. It contains a monstrous maw full of gnashing teeth. And it’s moving the bubble up towards us.

There’s also a third, much smaller bubble on the other side of the room. There appears to be a person inside this one. We poke at it, but it is just as impenetrable as the one outside. Remy asks me to levitate him up to the refinery machine, so I do. He says it has a blockage. Dalish asks me to send him up to cast identify, so I toss him up in the air. He says it’s a mana reactor and it requires a person be attuned to its workings. That person can then turn it on and off and control the flow of mana.

The monster it the pit breaks through its bubble and eat Dalish, and the reactor, and everything explodes. The lady is glad we’re finally making progress.

Round Five:

We run all the way back to the reactor.

Dalish and Remy get into a mine cart and I levitate the whole thing up. They locate the blockage and try to will it away, as though controlling mana, but it’s not quite all mana. They concentrate harder on the part that is mana, and I get so distracted, they fall a bit before I manage to recast the spell and catch them. Something in the pipe gives a little, but they still can’t get at the problem. Klyce offers to bust the pipe, so I bring them down and lift him up. He alters himself and busts through the pipe. There is a small mana explosion. I bring him down quickly, and Remy and Gerhardt rush to stabalize him.

Mana is pouring out of the pipe, but then something else falls. Something long and black falls onto the lower bubble above the gaping maw. How… how do we… I have this idea… I’ve been working on a longer jump spell…. I run, and jump, and Klyce boosts me, and as I’m about to fall, I Thunderstep out to the center. Ohgodohgodohgod! Don’t look. Don’t look! I reach down and pick up a black metal spear with a spade-shaped blade. It looks like it belongs on a clock. I thunder step back twice to get off this horrible monster.

Dalish identifies it as a spear of time manipulation and returning. That sounds fancy. Dalish tries to throw it, but it seems a bit heavy for him. Remy picks it up and throws it right through the small bubble, skewering the man inside. The bubble pops and the man dies, just before the monster breaks free and everything explodes again.

Round Six:

The lady approves of us finding the spear, and when we wake up, Remy still has it. He disguises it to look like a walking stick and we go looking for a clock tower missing a hand. We ask around, but there are no libraries here. The clock on the bank isn’t missing a hand We go to the center of town to see what we can see. The market, bars, police, the mine. Someone mentions the church that Cass blew up, so we head over there.

The front is crumbled, but in the back, there is a desk with a lit candle. A skeleton rests in the far corner with a fancily painted skull. There’s a prayerbook to the Dawnmother of the Eternal Sun. Klyce thought he saw movement, so he lights up the room. We all cast about, but see no one. Dalish starts knocking on walls and Remy blows out the candle. I really want to look at that prayerbook, but everyone is preoccupied with finding secret doors or a skulking figure. Remy goes to check out the skeleton and it starts talking!

His name is Kevin and he’s been here since long before the explosion. He has no idea why they’re blaming it on Cass now, it was so long ago. He was alive before the blast, but then he wasn’t anymore. He says his brother, Carmine, used to work with him, but got tired of everything and left to go try and find a way out with the ‘bandits.’

We explain that we’re from the outside and we’re looking for the refinery foreman. He can’t reckon time very well and doesn’t know how long it’s been, maybe years. He hasn’t seen the foreman in a very long time. I ask about his magic, because it doesn’t seem to be like ours. He says it comes from the goddess in the form of miracles. He believes that if his brother came back they could raise the church and then his goddess would talk to him again.

Boom!

Round Seven:

New plan. We run down the mine and this time, we pop the bubble more carefully and discover the Sheriff inside. He tries to get Remy to pop the monstrous bubble in the middle. And Remy throws the spear. Boom!

Round Eight:

We run back. The boys cast silence and protection. We pop the bubble and Klyce grabs the sheriff. Some quick threats, and careful placement later, he’s talking. He doesn’t know where the foreman went in the accident. There was an incident with worms. He came down and everything is hazy. His head hurts and he just wants us to end it all. Someone puts him to sleep and we start investigating the room. Poking and turning things until everything explodes again.

Round Nine:

The old lady is no longer standing. She doesn’t look good.

We go running around the edge of the bubble, looking for the bandits. We argue a bit while we run, about who Cass is and if she might know the foreman. Maybe the bandits are the ones who break her out of jail. We should really talk to her again. Remy keeps looking for the bandits, convinced that the church is the key.

The rest of us head back to the jail, then head over to Cass’s tree to intercept her. We manage to keep her calm enough to answer questions. But she hasn’t seen the foreman since the explosion in the mine. She had a house over by the bank. No one called her anything but foreman. I ask about the names on the lockers, but the foreman didn’t have one.

We head over the the bank to look for the foreman’s house, and meet up with Remy coming in with the bandits. They want to rob the bank. We all head inside. They set off explosives near the vault, but when the dust clears, there are a lot of dead people, and not a scratch on the vault. Cross comes charging in as we ditch out, and then everything explodes once more.

Finishing the Semester

On By ravonlockeIn Journal, TristiaLeave a comment

Finally back at school after that horror show of a fall break. It seems strange to be wandering the halls and going to classes. What are we even doing here? Everything is chaos, and here we sit, learning about math and history. Oh history. We’ve got a new teacher, and he just makes fun of all the “rich kids” in the class. Klyce seems much happier with this, at least. I just tuck in low and try to avoid notice as much as possible – it’s just like every other class now.

A lot of the upperclassmen have volunteered for the war, so the halls are a bit more empty now. Maribeth talked to her brother before she left, and then moved into my dorm room. She says he was probably involved in the mana ring, and he said she should stay close to me. I don’t think his motives are good, but I do trust Maribeth.

Someone left Dalish unattended and he told Malden all about the spellbook we found. Everyone but Klyce got really mad at him, but Malden only took out the Dominate Person spell and gave everyone the paper and ink they need to get all the spells, so I don’t see what the big deal is. Everyone knows Dalish can’t lie to save his life.

After all the fights we had at Nat’s place, and with a war looming, I give into the peer pressure and start getting up early with everoyone else for extra physical training. I’m not so sure about this crossbow anymore, not after what it nearly did to Remy, so the boys start teaching me to use a staff instead.

Klyce wants to go spell hunting one last time, so we head to the stables. When we tell the servires why we’re there, they all leave in a huff. Dalish notices some conjuration magic in one corner, so we mess around with water buckets, feedbags, and a horse, but we can’t get anything to happen.

Looking over the horse, Dalish notices something odd about the teeth, and with my help to keep it calm, sees that there are runes on its teeth and writes them out. Maribeth looks at the bridle and notices some similar runes. Looking over the tack, we notice bits of runs on different pieces of each set. Apparently, I’m the only one who knows anything about horses, so I set to work dismantling the sets and create a single set with all the runes and kit up the rune-teethed horse.

Nothing happens, so Remy casts his detect and sees that it’s an illusion spell of some sort, and putting it all together has created a unified aura. Looking around, he also notices the conjuration in the corner is an unseen servant like he has, so we leave that one be for now. We try riding around on the horse. We try casting an illusion on the horse. Nothing works.

Looking around the stable a bit more, I notice there’s a stall with runes inside it, too. So, I lead the horse in, with Remy nearby. The horse screams in pain and its leg buckles. With help, I quickly get it back out of the stall and unbridled. Gerhardt rushes over with healing potions to help, noting a lot of scratches around where the saddle and reins were. While we’re helping the horse, someone grabs all the kit and puts it in the stall. Phantom Steed appears in the air and they all hurry to copy it down. When the servires come rushing at the sound of screams we glare at them and they wander off again, but we’re done for now anyway. I fear for that horse, even though we saved it. There are only two left in the stables.

Something is wrong with Remy, but it takes him awhile to tell us. We all gather up in the dorms. Remy tells us that Professor Garian has been taking him down to the catacombs and making him use a machine that conjures weird mana beings, like the ones we fought around here. The machine then drains them, screaming, of all their mana, collecting it to fill the Fountain. Garian wants to roll out this method of collecting mana to the entire country. He is also using it for personal gain, juicing himself with mana, trying to become a god? Remy says one of these creatures killed the guy in his head, the memories the wierd gods gave him.

We all argue about whether the creatures are “real” or not. Whether they are just manifestations of mana that somehow hold more mana than was used to create them, or whether they are real, live, sentient beings. We talk about how all the ones we’ve seen have been trying to kill us, so why shouldn’t we kill them first. We talk about the gate the ones under Philomena’s house were trying to open.

Once again we consider just walking away, it’s none of our business. Klyce says Remy should walk away, too. I’m worried that he won’t be able to, that something bad will happen to him if he tries. Then the suggestions go off the rails. Destroy the machine. Kill Garian. What if it’s worth it. Maribeth wonders if her brother knew about the machine. He’s gone now, but not all his friends are. Klyce wants to talk to them, find out what they know.

Nat wants to help Remy learn more about his memory man, so they share the tea her Baba gave her. I sit with them, to make sure they wake up. Remy says people in his dream worshipped the Tempest, and we’ve been at war with these creatures for a very long time. I stop listening at this point, distracted by what my dreams could mean in this context.

She approaches, Shining as the Sun

She approaches, Burning as the Sun…

Fire … Destruction

Death … Rebirth

World Without End

Down to the Mines

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Nat wakes up the next morning, confused by being in bed at home. So, we explain all that happened after the attack. Just as we decide it’s time for breakfast, Kendrick comes in and shoos us out to talk to Nat. So, the rest of us head on down and have lots of bacon and orange juice. I don’t know why it creeps out some of the guys so much, it’s delicious.

When Nat finally comes downstairs, it’s to tell us why we were invited in the first place. More problems only child-wizards can solve, apparently. This was not the life I thought I would get by going to the Academie, not at all. I wanted magic and parties and fun, not death and fighting and war. Anyway, Nat says people have been disappearing into the mists, or into the sea down at the coast. Nat also tells us that some of the undead in the mine are disappearing, too. She also finally admits to being a girl to the boys, but her father’s missteps when we arrived made it not all that surprising to them. Then she tells us that there are two newborns in town that are showing magic potential, too, which hardly ever happens around here.

Maribeth wanted to see the undead anyway, and since “disappearing into the mists” seems a bit too vague, we head down to the mines. Nat takes us down to meet her great grandfather, Nathaniel. Turns out, he’s just a skull these days, but apparently, the undead down here don’t mind, and still listen to him. Klyce asks about the missing…workers, and Nathaniel tells us that they haven’t slipped from his control, they just aren’t responding to his commands. Twenty-four of them went down to the deepest section, and while he can still feel them, they aren’t coming back. They’ve even sent living adults to go look for them, but those didn’t come back either. Remy asks a bit about the undead down here, and Nathaniel goes into a complicated lecture about bell curves and terrible things with big tongues. I don’t even want to know.

Nathaniel can’t move on his own, so he has a zombie he calls Brokeback, because well… you get the idea, that carries him around. He leads the way down into the mine, while Maribeth and Dalish ask about how he’s still functioning. Life and death isn’t binary, at least not for this family. Unfortunately, the family hasn’t been producing strong necromancers these last two generations, so he had to imbue his remains with his strength and will to keep the mine in order. He can’t cast new spells anymore, but he does keep his control over the undead, at least, he had, until recently. He’s happy to hear that Nat has learned to animate the dead, and says that will be enough, since he can still control them.

The mines are dark and creepy, and full of undead work teams. They don’t pay us any mind as we pass, though. Not until we get really deep anyway. There is a shuffling in the dark, but Nathaniel can’t feel them. It is zombies, though, and everyone digs in for the fight. Little tiny plant monsters crawl out of the fallen and skitter away into the dark. Once they are all down, Maribeth digs around in the remains and finds a dark black seed that’s pulsing. Pulsing just like the ground in my dreams!

The others are talking. They gather the seeds all up and burn them, filling the tunnel with awful smoke. I gust it out of my face, but I’m not listening. The pulsing didn’t stop until they were all burnt up. We’re walking again, everyone is talking about what we’ve seen, and blood magic and the war. Talking about digging deeper because of the war. But all I can think about is the pulsing.

Dalish shuts everyone up because there is something ahead. We creep forward to see a massive bloated body with writhing beneath the surface, standing right in front of a massive mana vein. I grab Maribeth and remind her that mana is unstable, to be careful of her fire. As it staggers forward, I try to lift it off the ground, but it resists, so I retreat and let everyone else take care of it. Once it gets away from the wall, I give Maribeth the okay to use fire, and a good thing, too. It tries to escape down a hole, but they burn it down before it can.

The path stops here, so we check down the hole and find a whole big cavern beneath us. Everyone is nervous of the water below, so Klyce drops down with a rope and swims it to some ground, making us a repel line that mostly avoids the lake. Turns out it isn’t an edge, but an island where we landed. There are dead vines covering the ground. I don’t like this at All.

In the center is a henge of stone. That’s really strange, we’ve heard of these in the old world, but around here it’s just mounds, usually. And what’s it doing way down here? We head up to look at them, and discover a pictographic story around the outside. Hunters and Gatherers worshiping six large figures in white with black dots for eyes and rays of light coming off their heads. Then there is fighting against jagged, horned humanoids with tails. Less hunters return to the six to receive gifts for their victory. There are symbols, too, and they look really familiar, but I can’t read them. I’m not sure I want to.

Nat steps between the pillars for a better look and disappears. We all follow, because what else were we going to do?

It’s suddenly very bright, we’re outside in the sun, but it’s also hazy. We’re in the henge, but there is a market all around us, inside and out. A large vast plain spreads out around the market. The people look like the Natives. At the far end of the henge are three stone thrones. A man sits in the center one, flanked by women on either side. They seem to be receiving people, judging disputes. Around us are six statues: a man in a toga, chin on his hand, thinking; a boulder shaped like a face; a fertility goddess, all green vines and flowers; an armored figure of white stone with flames for a head; a bowl filled with leaves beaing blown about by the wind; and a broken statue, having only sandals on feet and no body.

Someone lists off names they think they are, but I’m barely listening. Gods, these are old gods. I go over to the bowl, curious. I grab a leaf out of the wind and it crumbles in my hand. That does not bode well, but I keep looking at it, willing it to speak to me.

Maribeth goes to talk to the three. They speak in riddles and drain her of mana. Remy tries, and they ask for his light, even just half his light. He agrees and disappears. The others are poking about. A Native approaches the bowl and places a leaf inside, he looks very sad and speaks of a lost loved one. Not to me, he must be praying. I touch the bowl, but no one answers. I want to look around, but when I stick my head out of the circle, I’m right back in the cavern.

I find Remy on the ground, unconscious, and with one eye missing. I kneel by his side, stunned, until the others appear. The statues are gone, but the thrones remain. Skeletons entwined with vines sit upon them. Gerhardt hands out potions and those with full phials distribute motes to those that lost them. Now we have even more problems to solve.