??? - ???
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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.
3/??
This afternoon, we enjoyed some American Chinese food. General Tso's chicken, to be exact. Leather Man was perplexed at my chopsticks and simply used one at a time to spear chunks of chicken. After our breakfast, we set out again on our march toward the distant light. The mountains were clearly closer now than in the previous days. It seemed possible that we would reach the light before dawn, so we moved as quickly as we could. The others got exhausted a bit more frequently than I would prefer, and Leather Man was slower than I'd like in his armor, but there was no point in trying to get him to leave it behind. That seemed like an impossible task on multiple levels.
Again the bright star rose behind the moon, and I must admit it felt ominous. Threatening. I don't know why I felt that way, but it seemed like an intruder in the sky. We traveled through the night until we were close to the light source, which we could now see was a campfire. As we drew nearer, I could tell that it was not any normal campfire, but that it was an essential flame!
Leather Man indicated to us that he wanted to sneak up for a closer look. He went up and came back and told us... basically nothing, as we couldn't talk to him. We made our way to the fire, where we met a lone man. He had the look of a man from the middle-east, perhaps from the past. I attempted to communicate to him in Persian and, much to my great relief, he understood.
He told me his name was Sirhan, and that he had been waiting for us here with his fire and his cave. He said that he had heard of the arrival of great heroes that would go on to do great things, and that he was here to help them. I don't know if he had the right people. We were average at best, and not exactly heroes. He went on to tell us of his djinni that had protected him and kept him alive in this harsh wasteland and its connection to a certain amulet. He had one quarter of the amulet, but the rest had broken off and fell into a tunnel in the cave. He said that the djinni was bound to the amulet and that he could repair it with all of the pieces. If we could help him get the pieces, he could summon his djinni to take us out of the wastelands to where we needed to be. If we did not have the djinni's help, our journey would be perilous, if not outright impossible.
We inspected the cave and the tunnel. It seemed large enough to climb down and not overly dangerous. It did not involve scaling any huge cliffs or anything like that. Just a sloping and twisting tunnel down into the mountain. The cave itself was warm, and the tunnel warmer still, indicating this could be a volcano and there could be magma within. What's more, the place seemed to radiate mana as well as heat. I had noticed the presence of mana outside the cave and could sense it getting stronger in here. Sirhan told us he was a fire mage and that he could protect us from the heat inside. We agreed to his plan to get the amulet and allow him to shield us from the heat, but wished a rest first, after our long journey through the desert.
Prior to sleep, I took the opportunity to use magic to speak with Leather Man, whose name we learned to be Ambrose. He told us his story, that he was from a placed called Aquilonia. Admittedly, it doesn't sound like the name of a Polish city, but it's clearly some sort of European place. He was from a different time, a medieval time, and the Renaissance festival getup that he was wearing was his day-to-day attire. Those must have been uncomfortable times in Europe! He told us he was good with knives and able to move around unseen fairly well. He looked big and strong (not like Genda or anything), so he was probably capable in a fight.
4/??
We woke up and descended into the cave after receiving Sirhan's protection. The climb had a few difficult parts, and Elaine and Ambrose took a few spills. Nothing terrible, though. We reached a cavern that had three other tunnels descending gently from it. I took a moment to tend the others' scrapes and bruises, and then we set about investigating this cavern. The cavern itself was empty. There were numerous tiny tunnels leading all over, some of them high above where the light of day barely seeped in. The three major tunnels all led further down. There was no sign of the broken amulet in here, but by the laws of physics, it should have been here. It would have been all but impossible for it to have fallen out of the upper tunnel and into one of these three larger tunnels; it would have landed somewhere in the center of the cavern and stayed there.
As we investigated the larger tunnels, Ambrose caught sight of something down the central one. I looked, but didn't see anything. I invoked a spell to determine that, indeed, the central tunnel posed an immediately and real danger to us, but that the others did not. So, we chose tunnel number three. We went in and discovered a cave full of tiny sparkling flames, dancing around on the walls and ceiling. Upon closer inspection, it was evident these were little people, faeries, who were covered in flames. They were speaking to each other in high pitched tones. I was able to magically reveal their language to my mind, and, as expected, these faeries were a curious and fun-loving lot.
They were amazed to see "flesh creatures," as they called us, and were making comments about our size and appearance. I butted into the conversation and a wave of oohs and aahs went through them. One spoke, "The flesh creature does magic!" I got from these faeries the political landscape of these caverns. Each tunnel held a tribe. This particular tribe seemed devoted to being lazy drunken layabouts (so naturally I tried a tiny sip of their "fire wine," which tasted basically like regular wine). The tribe in the far tunnel were orderly and enterprising, while the central tunnel held a warlike and menacing tribe. The faeries acknowledged that the amulet had indeed fallen into the tunnel above and that it had shattered into three pieces. By way of their tradition of the upper cavern being neutral territory and things there being equally divided among the tribes, each took one piece of the broken amulet.
They were not immediately open to just giving us their piece. While these faeries didn't particularly want it or care about it, they had some notion of parity, that if the other tribes have a piece, they should too. They agreed to give us their amulet fragment if we obtained the others. That seemed reasonable enough to us, so we set about securing the other pieces.
We went next to the first tunnel, the home of the orderly and enterprising tribe. We were met by some official-sounding faeries with titles outside their main cavern. We negotiated briefly, and they first told us they wished the entire amulet so that they could summon a powerful creature of the air to stoke the fires of their cavern to increase their rate of reproduction. When I indicate to them that the final piece lay above the ground, where they themselves indicated they could not travel, and that it was never coming down here, they realized that dream was an impossibility. Instead, they said they would give us their amulet fragment if the warlike tribe were made to give us their piece first. In addition, they promised to tell us about a great treasure beyond our dreams if we should succeed in this. They were very concerned about the balance of power among the tribes and though that, should the warlike tribe acquire two or more of the pieces, it meant doom for them.
This left us with no choice but to try visiting the threatening and warlike faeries in the central tunnel. I still got the feeling that just walking down there was a bad idea, that we would come under attack. We instead concocted a scheme to awe them into giving us the fragment. We agreed to take refuge in the third tunnel, where I would ensorcel Ambrose to become living flame and grant him the ability to communicate with the faeries. He would go down and impress them as a fire god and order them to bring the amulet fragment out.
I don't know exactly what happened next, but somehow it worked. Sort of. The warlike faeries did bring out the shard, but all the faeries in all the caverns had been whipped into a frenzy. We quickly procured the fragments from the other tribes, as per our arrangements, and were told the great treasures lay west of us in another cave. The faeries didn't know if it was reachable by the surface, but they had found it through their intricate system of tunnels to the west. We got the pieces and quickly made our exit, and brought the pieces back to Sirhan. Sirhan was able to put the amulet back together and, indeed, summoned forth a huge djinni!
The djinn appeared as a man maybe three times my height. He was an air djinni and, when he formed, seemed to be made of the wind swirling together to take shape. It spoke Arabic to Sirhan, and Sirhan told us he had conversed with the djinn and it would take us wherever we wanted to go. I told him we didn't wish to leave yet. We were going to rest and then go find another cave nearby first, then we would take our leave.