Days 184-186
Our travel through the Desolation continues and leads us into a truly barren landscape. I feel the magic weaken and drain away from us as we travel and use the opportunity to have the apprentices familiarize themselves with the feeling.
Miriam has no magic at all, Dawn and Nina struggle to feel it at all, and even Hella is struggling with simple spells. Bran and Alder take the opportunity to hone their physical combat skills and here, again, we see Dawn fighting against the lack of their magic in their swordplay.
Once we are properly in the Blasted Lands magic dies completely. On the evening of the third day we make camp beside a pool of water that descends deep into the ground beyond eyesight.
Day 187
In the morning Miriam shows me a marker that she found across the pool from our camp. She explains that she went walking at night but stuck close to camp and didn’t want to mess around with something without someone else present.
The marker itself is a stone with Osyr writing on it. Kadia tells us that this whole area used to be beneath an island sea and this place in particular seems to have belonged to Osyr mystics. The text reads:
Here is shelter and peace and depths long lost. The waves don’t reach here. Here is safety from the liquid fire. In the depths may we find solace.
And there are other worn away runes for ‘invaders, victory, price’.
My first thought is that this may have been a place where Osyr sought refuge and survived the war. Kadia seems to think this unlikely given the lack of food and resources.
We all seem at a loss as to what to do and eventually I drain the life of a small bird to fuel a spell through the pearl to look at the past. I feel boiling water all around me and see dozens of Osyr with iridescent scale armour and flowing robes. They are fighting against people who I first think are members of the Collective...but I don’t see any of their emblems. On second glance these are members of a race who I know now to be part of the Collective...but they don’t seem to be part of it at this point in time.
A few more things click into possibility - does this race have a history before the Collective in which they tangled with the Osyr? Is this the race from whence the Collective’s energy-draining magic comes? Am I watching the pre-Collective here or just a race that would one day be subsumed by it? Too many big questions for this point in time.
Instead, we toss a message in a bottle in the depths of the pool. It says that people who know about the Osyr have been here and will be here again. If anyone is down there, perhaps they’ll make a habit of checking the surface and we might run into them one day in the future.
As we travel towards the next source of water we get attacked by some of the large carrion-eating birds. They are dispatched without much strain and they make a good meal at the end of the day. I also collect some flight feathers, beautiful iridescent-bronze white on the underside.
As we bed down for the night my mind drifts back to the Shadowgate and I wonder what news has come through.
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