Entry 82: My day as a crocodile

Dear Diary,
 
A week has passed since I last put anything down, and the days have been a quiet grind of looking and not finding. Here’s the short version of what I managed to pry loose.
 
I first turned my magic toward Klaus — the ghost-dragon of the Long Table. I pressed a watcher into the net of the city and listened where the ward-lines thinned. What I found was a cold certainty and a bitter unknown: Klaus did not leave by choice. His vanishing is tangled up with the Briar Ring’s rising shadow. Whether he was slain, spirited away, or drawn beyond the material plane I cannot say. All I could tell was that he is no longer in Keralon — and very likely not on this world at all.
 
Because the Briar Ring keeps surfacing in every dark corner of this mystery, I sent Khiria, my library assistant, to dig into Sir Ileos. Her notes were a slow unravelling of court whispers and ledger marks. Sir Ileos is not merely a local strongman — he’s one of the king’s inner circle, an adviser with old favors and older friends. He and the late Sir Donovan once walked the same road; but in the end that road between them ended in only hostility. Worse, Ileos disappears on long, secretive trips into the Lorewood. Nobody knows what he does there. Nobody will say it aloud, anyway.
 
While Khiria chased paper and rumor, I kept returning to the one thing that won’t stop nagging at me — the dagger Terrin gave me, the crude blade that has felt like both curse and compass. I buried myself in it for hours, turning its edge under every light. Then, all at once, the pattern snapped into place: a flash of insight where past scraps fit together like the corners of a map. Old injuries, old dreams, the rites we’ve seen — everything reframed by a single, small truth I’d been missing.
 
What I need now is someone who remembers the world before memory dulled it: someone who can name the spirits I am tangled with and tell the true history of the things that keep finding me. I can think of two people who might know. The nearer, the likelier, is Lady Rootskewer — blunt, dangerous, and honest enough to tell me what I need to hear. Conveniently, or cruelly, she’s likely to be at Haggayn in a week. If the festival goes as planned, I’ll have my chance.
 
Until then I wait and prepare. The more I learn, the less comfort I find in rest. The knife at my hip feels heavier each day.
 
This morning over bread and tea we made our choice: the Temple of Air, and the stone we knew lay hidden there. The maps placed it somewhere in the bones of the Lorerun River, where the bridge had fallen and a knot of elves and fey kept wary watch. The Feywild’s breath was heavy in that place, thicker than anywhere else in Keralon — too bright, too twisted, like a fever-dream pressing in on the city’s skin.
 
I had prepared the water-breathing spell. It keeps lungs safe, though it does nothing for the clumsy weight of limbs in the current. To spare myself the struggle, I shed my shape and took on scales and teeth — a giant crocodile cutting through the green gloom with ease.
 
The ruins appeared out of the murk: toppled columns, broken reliefs, a temple cracked in half by the river’s long hunger. And movement — first the skitter of massive crabs, then the dark glide of saghuagin, shark-men with too many teeth and too much hunger. They surged at us without hesitation. Steel, spell, and my jaws made short work of them, and soon one thrashed in our grip, bleeding into the water.
 
Pressed for answers, the creature croaked of their own hunt for the Stone of Water, and of a master deeper within who had claimed a lair in the drowned halls. That one would not speak to us in person, only reach into Luke’s mind with a voice as slick and cold as eel-skin. It was unsettling, though I admit I know the taste of such gifts myself.
 
Luke haggled with him in thought, bargaining like a merchant at market — our claim to the Stone in exchange for leaving the last ritual’s secrets untouched. In the end, the deal was simple: we would not tread into his chosen chamber, and he would not contest us in ours. A stalemate dressed up as courtesy.
 
Yet even as we swam away, the weight of that voice lingered in the back of my skull. The Temple is not ours alone. Something old and patient coils in its shadows, and it has already measured us.
 
The exploration of the temple began haltingly. Dadroz, usually so deft with locks, struggled as if the water itself had dulled his fingers. Doors resisted him, wards hummed with quiet malice, and more than once we wasted precious minutes circling the same drowned corridors. But persistence pays even in deep water, and at last we forced entry into one of the laboratories.
 
The mages who had once worked here had left clever mechanisms behind: levers and brasswork that drained whole chambers in defiance of the river pressing above. With a groan of gears, the waters sank, and in the damp silence we rifled through the ruin. To my surprise, scraps of parchment still clung together, their ink faded but legible. They spoke of the Stone of Water as a key to distant worlds, a conduit through which portals could be stabilized. Or destabilized. The arrogance was palpable in every line.
 
Other rooms told the same story in fragmented notes and half-mad scrawl. Someone had built a camp within the temple’s ribs, desperate to refine the ritual. A wrong frequency, they wrote, had turned the portal against them. I admit the words meant little to me, but Luke read them with that sharp, furrowed look that meant he was already untangling the implications.
 
From the makeshift camp, we descended further into the sanctuary. The water grew colder, darker. Then the black stirred. Tentacles whipped from the shadows, coiling around limbs and throats. Squid — monstrous in size, their eyes glinting like lanterns in the murk — and behind them, the warped intellect of a morkoth driving them with malicious precision. The fight was chaos: ink-clouds, thrashing bodies, the weight of the river pressing from every side. But slowly, stubbornly, we cut them down. When the last tentacle slackened, the sanctuary lay still once more.
 
At its heart rested the Stone of Water. A sphere of impossible beauty, its surface glass-smooth, its core a churning tide of endless seas. Magic pulsed from it like a heartbeat, promising both power and peril. But, as with the Stone of Acid, it was caged in a shimmering barrier, untouchable.
 
We sat in the drowned quiet, the glow of the Stone reflecting off our tired faces. Gael’s suggestion was sensible: search the remaining wings before exhausting ourselves against a puzzle without a key. That left us with two paths — the chamber claimed by the saghuagin master, which we had sworn to leave undisturbed, or another sealed laboratory.
 
We chose the latter. Again the draining machinery rumbled, and again the waters receded, this time leaving a chest carved with ward-runes. As the room dried, the wards sputtered and flickered out. Dadroz pried it open with something like relief, and inside lay six smaller boxes. Each held strange objects, seemingly unrelated at first glance — yet unmistakably instruments. Tuning forks, their resonance attuned to other planes. Which fork belonged to which world was uncertain, though speculation was quick and heated. A dangerous find, and perhaps the key to everything the old mages had been reaching for.
 
That left us with the one question we had tried to sidestep since entering the ruins: what to do about the inhabitant. Leave it sealed away in its flooded chamber? Or break our word and strike before it could strike us?
 
Promises weighed heavy, but not heavier than the danger. The ritual crafted here was too powerful to abandon in the hands of such a thing. We chose confrontation.
 
The creature knew before we even reached its door. Its mind brushed ours like oil slick on water, and its amusement soured into rage as we pressed in. Luke sealed the chamber with a conjured wall of stone, cutting off escape. I wove a storm of radiance into the confined space, sickly light gnawing at its flesh. It shrieked in our skulls as much as in the water. The fight was short, vicious, and lopsided.
 
At last it showed itself for what it truly was: an aboleth. Old, alien, and venomous in thought as well as form. Its voice clawed at us even as its body faltered, spitting curses, promising ruin. We did not destroy it. Better to leave it shrieking in the cage of its own hatred.
 
The chamber held more than the beast. We sifted through sodden notes, their ink smudged into half-legible warnings. The story was always the same: the ritual had failed, fracturing into wild portals. Through one of them, the aboleth had come. And now it lingered, searching for the key to remake what had been lost.
 
The creature’s words were useless, so I turned to my own craft. Through divination I glimpsed truths: the aboleth had no intention of leaving. It would have to be forced, or outwaited. And the temple itself was a trap in waiting. Remove the Stone of Water, and like the other temples, the structure would collapse. One more thing, bitter but comforting — the ritual the aboleth craved was no longer here. It would never find it, not in these ruins.
 
That left only the Stone itself, pulsing within its cage. We returned to the sanctuary to puzzle out the barrier. Hours dwindled as Luke tested theories, ruled out errors, muttered to himself in tight concentration. At last his eyes lit with certainty: the barrier would only yield to a planar key, a tuning fork resonant with Limbo — the chaotic crossroads that brushes all other planes.
 
But knowing was one thing. Choosing was another. We had thirty forks to our name, and no certain map. Some we could discard quickly, but the rest? Still too many. Each hum held a promise. Each wrong strike, a risk.
 
With no other path left to us but blind trial, Luke reached for one of the forks — a paintbrush, of all things — and touched it to the barrier. He vanished before I could even draw a breath. One heartbeat later, Liliana followed suit, reckless as ever, vanishing just as suddenly.
 
The others looked ready to chase after them like lemmings. I cut them off with a raised hand and the sharpest words I could muster: Be patient. Be sensible. For once in your lives, wait. We didn’t know what had become of Luke and Liliana — whether they had been obliterated or thrown into some corner of existence from which there was no return.
 
I pulled out my Tarnstone with a hand that trembled more than I wanted them to see. “Luke?” Relief swelled sharp and sweet when his voice answered back at once. He was alive — stranded in the desert wastes of Arborea, but alive. Liliana was on the same plane, though the magic had scattered them apart. At least they were both alive and safe.
 
They had no immediate path back. Neither did we. So I locked the worry tight in my chest and turned back to the task before us: the Stone of Water. Gael, steady as ever, lifted the puzzle cube and pressed it to the barrier. This time, it was the cage that dissolved — and not the man.
 
The Stone throbbed in my hands, a living tide trapped in crystal. As I probed it with magic, its secrets unfurled: dominion over water, a voice like the sea itself, and — most crucially — a way to reach across planes. A grin broke over my face before I could stop it. The Stone could lead us to Luke and Liliana.
 
But before we could test it, Luke contacted me again. His voice was buoyant, smug even, and when he mentioned both of them had found a potential route home, my heart finally unclenched. Then, in the same breath, he mentioned meeting someone new. A desert fox-woman named Rifka. Another “exotic love interest.” I swear, leave him unsupervised for five minutes and he comes back with a romance subplot.
 
That meant we didn’t need to spend the Stone’s power on retrieval. We could turn it against the aboleth.
 
I reached for the Stone — and the temple shuddered. Stones cracked, beams groaned, water roared as the ruin began to collapse around us. We scrambled upward, fighting the current and falling rubble. When we reached the aboleth’s chamber, the prison we had left it in was shattered. The beast was gone, leaving only broken stone and silence in its wake.
 
With the Stone claimed and the temple crumbling behind us, there was nothing left but to retreat. We staggered back to Wolf’s Rest, tired and dripping river-water, intent only on warmth and sleep.
 
We hadn’t even shaken off our cloaks when Lumeria was upon us, eyes sharp as knives. “Where is Luke?”
 
So I told her. That he was stranded on Arborea thanks to a magical mishap. That he was, in all likelihood, spending his exile in the company of another beautiful woman. Perhaps it was unkind to say it, but the words tasted too sweet to swallow. If Luke traded Lumeria for Rifka, I would not mourn the match.
 
Her reaction was priceless: first scarlet, then a mottled violet, fury and embarrassment warring across her face. And then — gone. Vanished into thin air.
 
For one heartbeat, I allowed myself to hope she had simply stormed off. But reason whispered otherwise. Lumeria had not left. She had shifted. Which meant she could walk the planes. Which meant Luke might not be stranded much longer.
 
And which also meant the game between them had just grown far more complicated.