The moment Fractus released the Chaos Spark, it slammed into Rekha Mar-Khabazza like a thunderclap of pure possibility. Reality fractured around him as every potential future action of every person nearby bloomed into a shimmering cloud of probability, a hallucinogenic storm of what might be layered over what was. The Snow Leopard had made the case plainly: Rekha was the only viable choice, even if he was craven and perpetually trying to escape his obligations. The terms were equally plain – as long as Ravenna was alive to keep him on the right path, the arrangement would hold, but should Ravenna ever fall, Rekha would need to be put down so the Spark could pass to someone more worthy. Rekha, still reeling from the psychic assault of the Spark, could only note that he hadn’t wanted any of this in the first place.
The party wasted little time in the heart of the citadel. They backpedaled through Ravenna’s tunnel, emerging onto the bridge above the pitch-black room where a demon had once nearly destroyed them. Reunited with their full complement of eleven – including Naisha, Arlaina, Savanya, and the rangers Lokni and Kima – the group made their way down into the courtyard. Rekha, still overwhelmed by the Chaos Spark’s disorienting effects, leaned heavily on Naisha as his guide, unable to distinguish the present from the shimmering cloud of probable futures surrounding everyone he looked at. The gloomy, sourceless gray light of the realm cast no shadows, and strange entities wandered the courtyard at a distance – a creature made of a substance resembling silly putty, a thing with fifteen arms and no legs, a gelatinous mass of mouths and teeth – none of them hostile, all of them simply existing in the low-grade hallucinogenic haze of this place.
Passing beneath the archway of the twin towers, the party stepped out onto the Plane of Gates, the infinite expanse of smooth gray flagstones worn down by some unknowable force. Portals manifested and vanished at random across the plain, each one triggered by a chaotic event occurring somewhere far away on the world of Cignoria. In a rare moment of clarity born from the Chaos Spark, Rekha warned the group that whatever lay on the other side of any given gate was the source of that chaos – an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, a forest fire – and stepping blindly through could mean instant death. The party agreed that someone would need to scout each gate before the group committed to passing through.
The first gate appeared silently, rising from the gray stone like an elevator, its interior obscured by a thick gray haze. Ravenna pressed forward and shoved her head through, only to be immediately struck by a chunk of rock as the world on the other side convulsed in a violent earthquake. She glimpsed a scorching, sandy landscape with craggy cliffs collapsing all around before crab-crawling backward out of the portal. The gate closed shortly after, and the party settled in to wait for another opportunity.
The second gate was larger and appeared even closer, and Ravenna moved toward it with purpose. This time, the other side was an isthmus of rock suspended over a sea of lava in the midst of a volcanic eruption. The intense heat set Ravenna’s cloak ablaze before she could pull herself free, and the party dragged her out and smothered the flames with their cloaks. The damage was severe – third-degree burns across her shoulder – and Savanya had to use powerful healing magic to begin repairing the charred flesh. Ravenna, darkly amused despite her agony, muttered that being burned once was her fault, but after a fifth time, she’d have something to say about it.
With Ravenna injured and their options dwindling, the party attempted other solutions. Ravenna tried to teleport the group back to a known tower on the material plane, but the spell fizzled completely – they were on a different plane of existence entirely, and no amount of magical effort could bridge that gap. An attempt to use divination magic to locate a stable nexus backfired spectacularly, sending a magical feedback loop through Ravenna that left her stunned and sitting on the gray stone, head in her hands. It was only after she recovered and tried again that a successful casting revealed a shimmering cloud of shifting, disintegrating gates – and with it, a new idea.
Ravenna pointed at Mar-Khabazza. The Chaos Spark had given him an intuitive connection to probability itself, and if anyone could sense which gate led somewhere survivable, it was him. Rekha, still half-lost in the haze of possible futures, focused on the simplest desire he could articulate: he wanted to sit on his couch with his feet up in front of a fire. Gate after gate manifested and vanished as he shook his head – no, not that one, doesn’t feel right.
October 3, 7762
The eighth gate appeared just ten feet away and something in Mar-Khabazza said yes. He stepped through and found himself standing in the middle of a raging prairie fire, smoke billowing in all directions, the flame front moving away from him across a field of burning grass. It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t instant death. He retreated, told the others to move, and then planted himself in the middle of the gate’s threshold, reasoning in a thoroughly chaotic quantum sense that being simultaneously on both sides of the portal might keep it from closing while the others scrambled through.
One by one the party stumbled into the burning prairie, several of them catching fire or choking on smoke as they emerged. Furlbrow fell screaming to the scorched earth, his leg ablaze. Ravenna, still burned from her earlier ordeal, conjured a magical shelter – a sturdy enchanted edifice whose interior was completely unaffected by the inferno raging outside – and the group piled in. They watched through the walls as the flame front swept past, leaving behind a landscape of smoke and ash. They ate, rested, and healed for thirty hours across two consecutive castings of the shelter, waiting until the air was breathable again.
When they finally emerged, Arlaina studied the fragments of the shattered moon drifting in the sky and delivered her assessment with quiet confidence: they were thousands of miles south of Opal, somewhere between the equator and home. Ravenna used her divination abilities to search for a permanent magical nexus and found one approximately 150 miles to the west-northwest. There was nothing to do but walk. The party set out across the vast, unspoiled prairie – flat and arid , grass stretching to every horizon, wild horses stampeding in the distance and a lightning storm flickering far to the east. Ravenna conjured food and water daily, making the journey almost casual despite its length.
October 10, 7762
Seven days later, a thin wisp of smoke rose straight up from the plain ahead of them before being sheared off by the wind. Lokni and Kima slipped ahead to scout and returned with a report: a small homestead of four grass huts, a natural spring, a communal fire, and a large gray rock at the center of it all. No sign of the inhabitants, but the camp was clearly well-lived – tanning racks, drying racks, the smell of a meal being prepared. The party approached as a group of nine, weapons sheathed, with the two rangers hanging back in the grass as a precaution.
Seven men sat around the fire, all of them middle-aged, dressed in homespun cloth and leather, speaking a language none of the party recognized. Their leader – a clean-shaven man with a shaved head, wearing voluminous robes and leather sandals – smiled broadly and gestured for the strangers to join them for dinner. The water from the spring was extraordinary, cold and nourishing in a way that made everyone pause mid-sip, and the bald man laughed warmly and pointed toward the pond as if to say, yes, that’s ours, isn’t it something. Magnus Strange offered a trinket as a gift and settled in completely, while Rekha quietly dispatched Ravenna to inspect the gray rock.
The rock was unmistakably a node stone, and unlike the corrupted stones the party had encountered before, this one radiated calm – a sense of living things thriving, of water and growth and deep, patient earth. Ravenna attuned to it and the side of the stone went misty, a portal shimmering open along its contoured surface. The homesteaders watched with knowing smiles, nodding and pointing at the stone as if to say, yes, we know what that is. Before stepping through, Ravenna conjured a generous spread of fresh food – fruit, vegetables, meat – and left it as a parting gift for the men who had welcomed eleven armed strangers without hesitation. The bald man raised his water skin in farewell as the party stepped through the mist and vanished.
The void received them in silence. Two-dimensional walkways stretched in every direction from a ten-foot platform, manifesting only where someone looked and fading to nothing the moment attention shifted. Ravenna and Savanya began keeping meticulous dual maps of every turn, every platform, every exit, determined to build a record that could be used again in the future. The party adopted a strict strategy of always taking the rightmost exit at each platform, crossing fifteen nodes before reaching a massive intersection 130 feet across with thirteen radiating paths. Rekha attempted to sense other souls in the void and found nothing – just the eleven of them, alone in the featureless dark. After days of travel, the maps diverged and the party was forced to backtrack to find where the records disagreed, all while the food supply dwindled toward a hard deadline. With ten days of rations remaining and no way to conjure more inside the void, Rekha Mar-Khabazza gathered the group, looked them each in the eye, and delivered the most confident lie of his career: he had never led them astray, and they should stick with him. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the Chaos Spark flickered with something that might have been amusement.