On a bitterly cold October morning, eight souls gathered at the cemetery gate along the Rangers Road on the outskirts of Opal, steeling themselves for a journey into the Void. The party consisted of the three companions Mar’Khabazza, Ravenna, and Magnus Strange, joined by Naisha, Savinia Lorasong, Arlaina Darkmoon, and the two veteran huntresses Lokni and Kima. Their mission was singular and desperate: to find the prison of the ancient entity known as Az, wrest the Death Spark from his grasp, and restore the cycle of life to a world whose population had been inexorably dying out for thousands of years. The men-at-arms who had traveled with them before wanted nothing to do with it, and so it was these eight alone who stepped through the gate and into the absolute stillness beyond.
The history of the Death Spark weighed heavily on their minds as they walked. Long ago, the gods of Death, Famine, and War had grown curious about a strange power source existing outside the boundaries of reality itself. Against the warnings of Faylin, the Stern Teacher, Keeper of the Knowledge Spark, they climbed to the top of the Tower of Erebo and began their experiments – and in doing so, they accidentally summoned Az. The confrontation was brief and catastrophic. Az slew the three gods, seized the Death Spark before it could be absorbed naturally, and was only stopped when the surviving powers of the world managed to imprison him. But in their haste, they imprisoned him with the Death Spark still in his grasp, and ever since, the population of Cignoria had been slowly, inexorably dwindling – now reduced to a mere 4.3 million souls.
Ravenna opened the cemetery gate and the party stepped through into the Void. The platforms they walked upon were two-dimensional – possessing length and width but no thickness whatsoever – their edges so perfectly sharp they could slice off the end of a ten-foot pole without effort. The party traveled roped together as mountaineers would, knowing that a single misstep would send someone drifting away into the gravity-less nothingness forever. Naisha and Savinia Lorasong each kept independent navigation logs of every turn and intersection, checking their records against one another as they went, so that no matter what lay ahead, the party would always be able to find their way back out.
Mar’Khabazza led the way, guided not by any map or compass but by something deeper – a subtle stirring in the place inside him from which all his uncanny abilities arose. He had long believed the gods had chosen him for a special purpose, and now, with the Chaos Spark quietly working through his instincts, he strode forward with the serene confidence of a man who had been told by heaven itself which way to walk. Days passed in the absolute silence of the Void, marked only by hunger and fatigue, the glossy black platforms stretching endlessly ahead.
October 27, 7762
On the fifth day, Mar’Khabazza felt a strong pull toward a single gate at the end of a passage – a portal back to reality – and Ravenna confirmed it was large enough for all eight of them to pass through.
They emerged onto a freezing, windswept plain beneath a sky alive with the eternal meteor showers of Cignoria’s destroyed moon. The standing stone gate behind them – three great slabs stacked like Stonehenge – stood alone in the howling dark. Arlaina Darkmoon, Lokni, and Kima studied the stable orbital fragments of Evet, the Ruined Moon overhead, and together with Magnus Strange they determined the party had arrived far to the north and east of the Upheaval. Ravenna sat in meditation and reached out to the distant knowledge of human settlements, confirming what the skygazers suspected: they had landed in a place called Chernyy Polyats, a dark and forbidding continent thousands of miles from anything familiar. Magnus Strange recalled old lore about an ancient civilization that had once used this very region as a hub for mapping the Void – a civilization that had long since fallen.
Ravenna conjured a warm magical shelter against the howling arctic wind and provided a hot meal for the entire party before they slept. The rangers rotated through short watch shifts in the freezing dark while Magnus Strange used his own sleepless hours to exercise and clean his weapons. Above them, brilliant green aurora flared silently across the northern sky, painting the clouds in pale, ghostly light. When morning came, Ravenna meditated again and sensed a great and ancient evil to the north – a place where those who ventured did not return. It was, of course, exactly where they needed to go.
Ravenna handed her imprint stone to Mar’Khabazza and hurled herself skyward through magical means, teleporting four thousand feet into the air before casting herself into flight just below the cloud ceiling. From that height, the horizon stretched roughly seventy-seven miles in every direction, and she could see the massive mountain ranges flanking the plain to the east and west, with nothing but dark, flat rock and cracked ice extending northward.
She returned to the group and confirmed what Mar’Khabazza already felt in his bones: north was the way. And so north they went, day after day, through wind-blown snow and broken terrain, with Ravenna conjuring food and shelter each evening as the cold deepened around them.
October 30, 7762
After three days of walking, the rangers noticed something extraordinary in the sky above. The aurora borealis, which had previously drifted in random flowing curtains, had begun to converge – all of its streamers pointing toward a single location on the northern horizon, like ribbons tied to the end of a stick and blown by a fan.
November 2, 7762
Two more days of travel brought the party to a threshold they could not see but could absolutely feel. The spellcasters were hit with a sudden, overwhelming wave of raw energy – Savinia Lorasong stumbled and nearly fell, Ravenna stopped dead with a deep frown of concentration, and Mar’Khabazza looked around with wide, curious eyes. The energy was unlike anything they had encountered before: not the ecstatic joy of living things growing and thriving, and not the greasy, decaying wrongness of the river valley – but something perfectly balanced between the two, like the line splitting yin from yang.
Ravenna reached out with her magical senses to identify the source and was struck with a psychic wallop so powerful it nearly knocked her from her feet. The answer was immediate and overwhelming: they were standing inside a colossal earth node – a supernode of such immense power that any magical compass within it would simply spin in endless circles, unable to find north.
November 3, 7762
The party pressed on, veering slightly west as they continued northward, deeper into the phenomenon. Then Ravenna made a fateful decision. She sent her presence outward, attempting to attune to the supernode and delve beneath its neutral energy toward the void below – and something struck back.
A shadowy entity with two piercing eyes crushed her presence like a fist closing around a candle flame. Ravenna cried out and was thrown flat on her back, her heart stopped momentarily by a wave of powerful cold energy. Magnus Strange rushed to her side and began resuscitation while Savinia Lorasong worked her healing arts to restart Ravenna’s heart. As the two of them worked over her, Mar’Khabazza and Arlaina Darkmoon both spotted something to the north: a dark, shadowy humanoid figure, roughly ten to twelve feet tall with pale glowing eyes, had winked into existence and was now inexorably approaching. The party formed a skirmish line – archers on the wings, spellcasters in the center – and waited.
Mar’Khabazza raised his voice against the gale and commanded the figure to come no closer. What followed was a silent battle of wills, the entity pressing against Mar’Khabazza’s sense of self with a crushing psychic weight, demanding to know who he thought he was. Mar’Khabazza pushed back with everything he had – and then the Chaos Spark manifested unbidden over his shoulder, a swirling black cloud wisp of divine power made visible. The moment it appeared, the psychic assault stopped completely. The shadowy figure went still, and from somewhere within its darkness came a single word of acknowledgment: “Keeper.” Mar’Khabazza nodded with the smug satisfaction of a man who had always known this moment was coming, and demanded to be taken to the Death Spark. The guardian replied that the prison was here, and that the Keeper of the Spark would be brought forth – and with that, primal forces of earth, water, fire, and air began to churn in the distance as something enormous coalesced into being.
Magnus Strange broke into a run toward the manifestation, urging the party to catch their enemy off guard. He slowed as the scale of what lay ahead became apparent, and then he stopped entirely and laughed – a short, disbelieving laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation.
Chained to a colossal throne of gray stone, bound by enormous metallic chains with links six feet long anchored to pillars fifty feet high, was a skeleton the size of a six-story building. Its jaw was extended like a wolf’s, filled with broken fangs, and from the crown of its skull rose towering bone antlers reaching another sixty or seventy feet into the sky. The gray stone of the throne and pillars looked disturbingly like the dead stone of the portal gates they had encountered before.
The party spread out around the chained figure, keeping well beyond the reach of its massive limbs. A deep thrum shook the earth – like a piston that moved once an hour – and the skeleton’s aura came alive. It was aware of them now. When it spoke, it did so not with a booming, threatening roar but with the calm, almost conversational tone of a gentleman who had been sitting in the same chair for a very long time. It noted that Mar’Khabazza was not Gisara, nor Akeen – the visitors it had known before. It expressed something almost like wistfulness when it mentioned Akeen, saying it had missed their visits. It acknowledged Ravenna as the heir to the God of Knowledge with a note of genuine amusement, and when Mar’Khabazza demanded the Death Spark, Az replied simply that they were at an impasse: he had what they needed, and they could not take it.
Mar’Khabazza pressed forward, demanding a price. Az’s answer was straightforward: release him, and he would surrender the Death Spark. He would summon his archangels and night lords, assess the state of the world, and determine whether his campaign was still worth pursuing. The party weighed this in silence, knowing full well what freeing a being who had slain gods and unleashed the Razzik upon the world might mean. While the negotiation continued, Ravenna established a telepathic link among the spellcasters and then reached deeper, using her psychometric abilities to peer into the history of the prison itself. Visions came in rapid succession – Akin Kaliberda visiting Az over centuries, his visits growing less and less frequent as the ages passed; and before him, a plain-looking woman, lithe and graceful, coming again and again across the millennia. Then, just as something older and more significant began to surface from the depths of time, an arcane blast erupted from the earth and slammed into Ravenna, shattering her concentration entirely. The shadowy guardian’s voice rang out across the frozen plain: there would be no scrying here. The negotiation with Az had only just begun, and already the prison itself was fighting back.