??? - ???
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1/??
I don't know how I ended up here, or even where here is. I see only bleakness. It is eerily reminiscent of the Gobi, where for the last few months, I spent time in Kublai Khan's Yuan China at a trading post on a southern route of the Silk Road.
After my meeting with Graves, I decided to travel to a time and place that Tophet would not dare accost me or send his spies - if he could even find me. Empires are not built by armies and horses alone. In our world of magical potency, sorcery always lies behind the soldiers. So, too, was this true for the Great Khans. I learned from my uncle of the Eight Sorcerers of the Uncounted Hordes who served Kublai Khan and his predecessors, and how they brooked no insolence or interference from outside mages. The Great Khan forbade it, and the Eight enforced his word. Or, so went my uncle's stories. Regardless of their veracity, I knew this was my best chance to meet Persian speakers and have none of them be Alexander Tophet!
I went first to my ancestral home of southeastern China and moved up the rivers into the highlands at the southern edge of the Gobi. I found a trading post where the primary language was Cantonese, as a minor nobleman from Guangzhou had been tapped to be the local magistrate. I knew there would be Persian speakers here, because Persian had been known in the foreign quarter of Guangzhou since the tenth century, most of which had filtered into China from the Silk Road routes controlled by the nobility of southern China. I dared not teleport directly into the Gobi, so as not to attract the attention of the Eight.
I took a job in a tea house at the trading post, sorting leaves, preparing tea, and serving patrons. While the work was laborious and lasted from sunup until after sundown, I had many opportunities to meet with Persian speakers and hear their stories. I traded them lessons in Cantonese for lessons in Persian and, over the months, I was able to develop a reasonable command of their strange tongue. At night, I practiced the day's lessons and took time to examine a couple of math books I had secreted in on my journey.
My time there found me entirely left alone, there in some long forgotten oasis of trade. The magistrate maintained strict order, and I was never in any danger from locals, travelers, or unwanted visitors sent by Tophet. Of note, there were also no Hell's Angels, but it would not surprise me if they were all descended from the Khans. I was slowly and steadily able to understand more and more of the book, until I was at last confident that I would be able to help Graves with his ritual. I traveled with a caravan south out of the desert and back to the Canton, and then back to modern civilization.
I met Graves at the appointed location. He looked haggard, as though he had been fretting about the ceremony, or perhaps just not sleeping well for the last few weeks because of the ever-present threat from the Red Hand. We discussed our strategy for the ritual, leafing through the Book of The Gates and sharing our thoughts about different incantations. The hardest part was getting everything in the right order. The incantations were somewhat modular and could be inserted into a ritual in myriad different ways, leading to countless outcomes. Any neophyte could discover an ordering of incantations that would result in something happening (which is probably what happened to that charlatan in the Pasedena Mystery House), but to get the result you want, it takes a lot of work. Graves was very helpful; his methodology was far more intuitive and less studied than I'm used to, but I think, in that regard, we complemented each other nicely.
Regardless of his ability or mine, things did not go as intended. I have no idea what happened to Graves, but I awakened to find myself in a wasteland. Sand and Sun stretched for miles in every direction, and just at the edge of perception, I could see mountains. In my more immediate vicinity, I saw that there were two others with me, who had also arrived at the same place and time that I had, wherever and whenever this was.
I recognized one as Elaine Baxter. It seemed, then, that she had escaped the clutches of the OSI! The other was a large man wearing antique leathers, as though he were from a historical film set in medieval Europe. After a few moments, they each awoke. Elaine first, and then the apparent barbarian. Elaine was... different than I remembered. She seemed nervous and distant. The man, well, no one could say. He was unable to understand us and we could not understand him. It sounded like he was speaking Polish. I attempted some magic to help us communicate, but this desert was as devoid of mana as it was water.
We elected to start moving toward the mountains. We picked a direction - it did not seem to matter which, as all directions seemed identically bleak - and began our long trudge through the hot sand. I occasionally checked to see if I could make use of any magic, and it was clear that was not going to be possible. After sometime trekking through the sand, we came upon the skeletal remains of a person, a human person as far as we could tell. The remains included a wide-brimmed felt hat, which I helped myself to. I thought it would be good for preventing sunburn. Immediately thereafter, a vortex of air spun up in the vicinity of the remains and advances slowly toward us. Elaine was quick enough to back away from it as it came at her, and all of us ran from it. The man in leathers was awfully slow from carrying so much stuff and wearing that heavy Renaissance festival armor, but still managed to barely outpace it.
We walked into the night, and the stars rose in strange disarrangement. They were recognizable - the White Tiger of The West hung in the sky - but the direction of movement and the relative positions were off. It was as though we were in a parallel dimension where the stars were similar, but not precisely the same. The Moon rose and, behind it, a bright star that I have never seen trailed it. Sometime, I will have to find out more about that. We walked until exhaustion began to set in in the predawn hours of the morning.
2/??
We slept through the heat of the day and resumed our journey in the late afternoon. Fortunately, Elaine still had her same powers and was able to pull some water from another dimension to quench our thirst. She was also able to get us... a cheeseburger. Not my first choice, but it was better than trying to eat sand. Leather Man also had a skin of water that he had shared periodically. I was starting to think from his mannerisms that he might not just be a Polish Renaissance faire attendee, but maybe from a different time. His reactions to things such as my jacket and clothes seemed similar to that of a caveman seeing a steel garden hoe. He appeared mystified.
I learned along the way that Elaine had not really been captured by the OSI. She informed me that she was with the CIA and had been keeping tabs on the Promethean Foundation, a plant. So it wasn't the butler who did it, after all. That said, she was quite gruff and disinterested in talking much about herself, the OSI, or anything else, really.
It was a little discouraging when we began our hike today that the mountains hardly seemed any closer. It felt like we had covered more ground than we had, or somehow the mountains were more distant than they appeared. Whatever the case, it didn't seem like we were going to get anywhere fast. Fortunately, Elaine was able to keep us in water and food, so an imminent death of desert dehydration didn't seem likely. We did see another corpse or two out in the desert, some that seemed far more recently dead than the previous one with the hat. Leather Man got himself a decorative saber from one, which again prompted a vortex to spin up from the skull of the body and us to run away. After that, we didn't go near any of the rest.
As night set in, Leather Man spied a distant light in the mountains. He seems to be a perceptive fellow, Leather Man, as he was always noticing things around us. We decided that moving toward the light was our best option. We again tramped along through the night and began our rest just before sunrise.