Abimbala

Abimbala of Phlox was not born to the grove but to the stones and steam of the city. Her people, the Hathi, were builders and masons by tradition, great patient shapers of bridges and aqueducts, their wide hands steady as the land itself. She was different from the beginning - quiet, inwardly drawn, more concerned with the moss creeping through cracked flagstones than with the grand arches rising above them. It was said that when she first touched the great water crystal beneath Phlox - the shimmering heart that fed the city's fountains and canals - she wept, not from fear but recognition. For her, the pulse of the crystal was like the heartbeat of the world itself, vast and kind and sorrowful.   Her druidic calling came not through inheritance, but through listening. The druids of the Greenwardens found her at the river's edge, murmuring to the current as if it might answer - and occasionally, it did. They taught her to read the ripples in water, to feel the slow language of trees, and to heal with sap and song. Yet Abimbala's path was never purely pastoral. Phlox was a city of contradictions, its veins of crystal and metal twisting together in uneasy marriage, and she became a bridge between the two - a druid of balance, seeking harmony between the natural and the made.   When the water crystal began to thrum with strange discordant tones, the waters of Phlox turned faintly luminous, and the fish in the lower canals were found drifting belly-up, glowing softly as if lit from within. Abimbala descended into the aquifer beneath the city, only to find the great crystal pulsing with unfamiliar energy - erratic, agitated, and whispering in voices not its own. Among the voices, one name recurred: the Curators.   That was how she remembered the Enigma Society - a name she had once read, half-forgotten, in a forbidden wing of the Phloxian Library. The society was said to be an ancient order of scholars, mystics, and collectors who sought to understand the world's hidden mechanisms: the bones of magic, the clockwork of fate. The first two “Warehouses” of their order - I and II - were well-documented, one close to to the capital of Bonoloku, the other one close to Phlox itself, yet the entrance locked and sealed. But the third, Warehouse III, was a mystery, as the Curators move to a new unknown location in times of danger, leaving the previous inaccessible Warehouse behind.   Intrigued and desperate, Abimbala began to trace the trail. She sought on newer maps, shipping ledgers, and sailors' tales, until the pattern pointed her across the sea - to Bridgeport, that bustling tangle of docks and secrets. She sold her stone jewellery and boarded a merchant ship, carrying only her staff, a satchel of river herbs, and a shard of corrupted water crystal that still hummed faintly with the wrongness beneath Phlox.   The journey was long and salt-worn, filled with omens. Dolphins followed her wake, but none sang. When the ship reached Bridgeport's harbour, the air itself felt thick with unseen energies - as if the currents of Aeum, the world's lifeblood, tangled here in unseen knots. After weeks of subtle inquiry and a few well-placed offerings to dockside gnomes who knew how to keep secrets, she finally uncovered a clue: a half-burned letter bearing the round sigil of a stylized pyramid, the mark of the Enigma Society, and in letters printed below: "Visit the Conservatory - Learn everything about the rarest plants of Alana".   When she found it, the building was not what she expected: a small but pretty greenhouse at the city's edge. But beneath its surface she sensed the hum of hidden wards, old and potent. The Enigma Society had buried itself well.   Now she seeks their aid in deciphering the corruption within the crystal and, if her instincts are right, in recovering an ancient relic believed lost in the Warehouse close to Phlox: a Conduit Lens, an artefact said to focus and cleanse elemental energy. She suspects it may have been moved long ago, taken for study by the Curators and hidden within their third refuge.   If the Enigma Society cannot help her, she fears the city she loves will be doomed.