An unexpected journey

by Luke Thomas

Dear Diary,

The Morkoth is dead. Its squids, too. The water stilled, and for the first time since entering the drowned temple, I could breathe without the weight of fear pressing against my chest. The fight had been chaos — flashing tentacles, rending jaws, the constant pull of alien magic scratching at the edges of our thoughts. But when the beast sank, the silence felt heavier than the battle itself.

We regrouped near the altar, where the Gem of Water rested, glowing faintly with shifting shades of deep blue. Its light rippled across the walls like currents beneath the surface. The chamber here was unlike the flooded ruin above — clean, preserved, and strangely… waiting. Carvings of elemental beings danced across the walls, waves frozen in intricate mosaics, fish spiraling between shapes older than Keralon itself.

Before touching the gem, we rested. I sat cross-legged on the cool stone floor, tracing the magic lines carved into the chamber. It wasn’t meant to contain power — it was meant to direct it, like a lock without a key. We also discovered a glass orb etched with faint runes. When held, it pulls the wielder toward true north.

My fingers soon itched to take hold of the Heart, the reason why we were here. But knowledge comes first, power later.

We headed back into the research wing, looking for more information — and, if possible, more tools to make sense of this puzzle. That’s when we found the door hiding the master of the sahuagin, the thing whispering into my head. The aboleth. We decided to leave it for now, continuing deeper into the complex.

Behind another locked door, we discovered a sealed laboratory. Dadroz managed the runes carefully, activating the mechanisms that drained the room before we entered. At the far side sat a large chest, humming faintly with protective magic. The runes weren’t offensive, just… clever.

Inside the chest were six smaller boxes, each marked with unique symbols. Gael opened one cautiously, revealing harmless trinkets: wires, crystal shards, tiny brushes — mundane objects, or so they seemed. I had a sense they were… more.

Finally, we returned to confront the aboleth. We couldn’t leave it lurking so close to Keralon, not when its influence spread through the sahuagin like a disease.

The moment we opened the door, chaos erupted. A host of water elementals surged forward, crashing into Alistan and Liliana with the force of tidal waves. For a moment, they disappeared beneath torrents of swirling currents, but they held the line, anchored by sheer stubbornness and steel.

I shaped a wall of stone in the center of the chamber, sealing the aboleth and one of its sahuagin priests within my sister’s Sickening Radiance spell. The water around them grew murky with poisonous light. Outside the walls, we cut down the remaining elementals, Gael’s arrows finding hearts that shouldn’t exist.

When it was over, the aboleth raged from within its prison, swearing vengeance. I told it plainly: we cannot allow your purposes here, so close to the city. It screamed, calling us traitors, our deal broken. But we left buried there, encased in stone.

In its chamber, we discovered another torn diary page. It spoke of portals linked not just to the Plane of Water — but to other planes entirely.

We searched further, finding another room designed to drain itself dry. Inside, a second journal page, mostly intact, revealed more about the disaster that ended this place. The researchers believed they’d discovered a brand-new plane, something unrecorded in any known cosmology. The ritual to access it had been conducted in the main temple — the same summoning that almost certainly brought the aboleth here.

Which leaves us with the same conundrum they had: if it came through, we could send it back the same way… if we can replicate their frequency.

We returned to the altar chamber, where the Gem of Water waited. When I reached for it, a barrier lashed out at my mind. I staggered, forcing myself back to focus. The shield isn’t locked to us — it’s locked to a plane, its magic harmonized to frequencies we don’t yet understand.

When I touched the gem again, I glimpsed something through the veil — an ocean of violet-white energy, rocks floating like drifting islands, constantly shifting and breaking apart into new forms. Familiar. Wrong. Too close to the chaos of Limbo to be coincidence.

We turned to the six smaller boxes from the chest, guessing the researchers had prepared tools for this exact purpose. Each item resonated faintly at different frequencies — like tuning forks to other planes.

I started with a thin wire. Nothing.

Then I tried a paintbrush.

And vanished.

I landed on warm sand beneath a sky without clouds, a desert that stretched forever. Heat rolled off the dunes like waves. Through the telepathic bond, Liliana’s voice reached me — she, too, had been transported elsewhere, though to what plane, she wasn’t certain yet.

Alistan and Hayley panicked for a moment, but I calmed them and sent instructions via Sending. If they solved the puzzle, the barrier around the gem would collapse, and we’d return. Or so I had hoped, but alas that wasn’t the case. So I found myself stranded in an unknown plane.

I wasn’t alone for long.

The wind rose, carrying a sandstorm toward me, and in its heart moved shadows — many-legged, shifting shapes. I retreated quickly and conjured a Leomund’s Tiny Hut, sealing myself inside a sphere of safety. Then I called out to the nearest figure, hoping for diplomacy before claws.

She stepped forward — a foxlike woman, her fur pale under the desert sun. Her name was Rifka, a priestess from a nearby temple. She was seeking shelter from the storm as well, and I let her enter. She told me of her temple’s history: once founded by a sphinx named Chione, now long vanished. Inside the temple were dozens of portals, doors that touched countless planes — including, perhaps, ours.

I shared food from my satchel, and we waited for the storm to pass.

Then Liliana’s voice reached me again — she, too, had met one of the locals, who promised to show her how to use the roots of the World Tree to return home. Together, we sent another message back to Alistan and Hayley: We’ve found a way back.

Continue reading...

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An unexpected journey

Continue reading...

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