Abantey Dates: 9/23 – 9/24/367 A.L.
They spent the night watching for danger, the ruined wall a constant reminder of what it once contained, what wandered the savannah. As dawn broke, they gathered their gear, checking again for signs of hostile life with emerald scans and the skills of their scout and hunter, Tekla and Michale.
Today’s goal: find a way into the wreckage of the wall and tower – Ash’s Tower, once two-hundred feet tall, slumped, broken, barely higher than the formerly one hundred foot wall. Their magics were unleashed during the cataclysm that tore the Creators from the sky. Those magics tore through indestructible stone, melting it like candle wax, leaving gaps revealing the remnants of multiple levels in both the wall and Ash’s Tower.
Their first obstacle – the dust. The dust appeared right after the amethyst pulse, the one that broke most of the magic items. The dust is fine and black. It drifts and eddies, flowing into hollows, into cracks and crevasses. Sometimes, the blown dust reveals bits and pieces, half made segments of a wheel, or walls, or pipes, or glass. And sometimes the dust eats magic energy, draining a caster’s power only to return it as lightning. The more powerful the magic cast, the greater the harm reflected back. The trick is to cast your magic well out of its area of effect.
The dust coated the base of the melted wall and Ash’s Tower. It drifted like deadly black snow. Though it was mostly inert, enough anti-magic dust clumped in bits and pieces to render the use of magic within its domain impossible. Bok, Thunderella, and Anu wielded their sapphire magic hands from a distance to shovel the dust away from the base of Ash’s Tower and the adjacent wall, a task that would take hours.
Micheal stood guard and Toshiko coordinated them all with an Emerald link. Tekla, Travis, and Gracia climbed up into the biggest gap in the wall, descending into the lowest level of the corridors within the wall, debris blocking the easy paths. It was arduous, and time consuming, and thus no surprise that Travis discovered the bottom by falling waist deep into the dark and cold water that filled the floor of the wall, water filled with dust and oily, corrosive liquids. After Gracia determined that the water would do no immediate harm, as long as they did not cast magic, they worked their way through the rubble to a rupture in the tower’s wall.
Fortunately, by this time, the magic users had cleared a wide swath to both sides of Ash’s Tower, as the wall scouting team had reached the limit of their exposure to the foul waters filling the basement. After the rescue of the wall scouts, our heroes retreated to the inn to get cleaned up, healed, fed and rested before the next day’s work.
That night, as they slept, they all heard the voices that Anu heard in amethyst. Calling, sad, angry, lost, the voices sounded desperate. Anu heard nothing, as Thunderella had given him her amethyst-emerald ear clip to shield him from the amethyst dimension.
In the morning Bok was determined – she would ‘look’ into amethyst space to see if she could discover more about the voices. The party was equally insistent that it was too dangerous. Finally, they reached a compromise – Bok, Toshiko, and Thunderella would take amethyst locks – memorizing their real space position, so that if they became lost in amethyst, they would have a chance – a slim chance, of finding their way out.
They chose one of the rooms as a location, emptying it of furniture. While the mages focused to memorize the room, one of the voices seemed to come closer, making it more difficult to get a good lock. Thankfully, that was the only complication. Once the locks were taken, Toshiko linked the party with emerald so they could observe what Bok discovered, while Anu keep himself shielded from both emerald and amethyst by wearing the clip.
Bok opened her mind to see into amethyst space.
Right there.
The voice was right there, waiting, as she opened her amethyst eyes. Desperately, he grabbed her, pulling her into amethyst space…
…and Thunderella, and Gracia, and Travis, and Tekla, and Micheel! The force of the man’s agony and will was so powerful, that he pulled them to the cries of the woman. There, they saw the ghostly form of a man cradling a twisted specter of woman half in amethyst and half in real space.
Tosh resisted, grabbing Anu by the arm to hold fast to real space, and Anu threw an amethyst shield keeping them both in real space. They realized that Anu was the only one who might be able to navigate amethyst. So Tosh and Anu grabbed some supplies and stepped into amethyst. The force of the man’s agony was too powerful, Tosh and Anu wrenched out of reality and into chaos…
-B. Thomas