The party stood once more at the heart of the Upheaval, gathered around the towering stalagmite of hardened lava that offered the only pocket of calm in the howling, deafening caldera. After a failed attempt to breach the cyclones that spiraled across the volcanic basin, the group debated their next move with weary urgency. Rekha Mar-Khabazza, ever the pragmatist, attempted to delegate the dangerous task of entering the storm to Arlaina Darkmoon and Ravenna, reasoning aloud that in his years of leadership, it was always best to let someone else take the risk. Arlaina, pale but determined, pushed back – explaining that Ravenna’s previous failure had not been a flaw in the theory, but a failure of concentration. The answer was simple, if terrifying: they all had to go in together.
The group roped themselves into pairs, with Ravenna leading at the front and Arlaina anchoring the back, Magnus close behind her to keep her moving. Each party member chose a mundane task to focus on – Magnus rolled tobacco from a gun cartridge and prepared to light a cigarette, Ravenna tucked a book under her arm, and Rekha Mar-Khabazza settled into quiet thoughts of his distant kitchen and the comforts of home. They positioned themselves in the path of an approaching cyclone and waited, the roar of the storm growing louder and grittier with every passing minute. When the wall of wind finally hit, it was nothing like the ethereal gale of the caldera – it was a physical, punishing force, carrying shards of obsidian and pumice that tore across exposed skin like coarse sandpaper dragged at speed.
Corporal Furlbrow caught a full blast of obsidian to the face and went down hard, bleeding heavily. Naisha and Rekha Mar-Khabazza were blinded by the swirling grit, and several others were battered and staggered by the relentless assault. But Magnus, with the calm of a man who had smoked in worse conditions, simply held his focus – and in that moment of stubborn, mundane composure, the storm cracked open. A ghostly white tower shimmered into existence within the chaos, and at its base, a silvery portal pulsed with pale light. Magnus, Arlaina, and Lokni spotted it simultaneously, and without a word, began hauling the rest of the roped party toward it.
They stumbled through the gate in a heap, and with an abruptness like a door slamming shut against a storm, the howling stopped. The party found themselves sprawled across a vast, featureless plane of worked cobblestone. They were covered with volcanic grit and bleeding from a dozen small wounds, but alive. The sky above was a perfect, starless black – and yet everything around them was illuminated as if by full daylight, with no visible source. Behind them, the shimmering portal faded into nothing. Savinia Lorasong immediately set to work, channeling her healing magic first into Furlbrow’s ruined face and then moving through the group until every wound was closed and every injury mended.
As the party recovered and untangled themselves from the ropes, they noticed a distant keep rising from the cobblestone horizon – a square fortress with corner towers and an inner keep several stories tall, its dark windows offering no light and no sign of life. Across the plane, magical gates identical to the one they had passed through began randomly materializing and vanishing, appearing for unpredictable lengths of time before dissolving back into nothing. Nothing ever came through them. Rekha Mar-Khabazza studied the keep’s architecture and felt a jolt of recognition – it bore a striking resemblance to the fortresses of his Western homeland, though it was clearly not of this world. The group set off toward it, walking for roughly three hours across the silent, odorless expanse while gates flickered in and out of existence around them.
The keep itself was spotless – no weather stains, no missing stone, no sign of age or decay. A massive archway in the outer curtain wall stood open without any door or portcullis to bar the way, and the tunnel beyond it was a perfectly smooth passage hewn through an enormous wall.
October 30, 7762
As the party moved through the tunnel, a strange sensation crept over them – a tingling in the fingers and toes, a warmth behind the eyes, a subtle loosening of the world’s edges. By the time they emerged into the inner courtyard, the cobblestones seemed to breathe, and the movements of their companions left shimmering trails in the air. The keep had dosed them with something, and the world was no longer entirely reliable.
It was in this altered state that they first encountered Twig Snap. The creature was ten feet tall and appeared to be made entirely of flowing, ribbon-like appendages that moved with boneless, hypnotic grace – each gesture trailing impossible tracers of light for those already feeling the effects of the tunnel. Ravenna, drawing on her knowledge of the magical language of plants, addressed it in murmurs that sounded like rustling leaves, and the creature responded in kind – its voice a chorus of snapping twigs and falling autumn leaves. It called itself Twig Snap, explained it had simply arrived and stayed, and warned the party that other travelers in this place were not nearly as agreeable as itself. Then, growing bored with the conversation, it wandered off and lay prone on the cobblestones, its limbs waving gently in a breeze that did not exist.
Ravenna attempted to trace the location of the Chaos Spark – the object at the heart of their entire journey – but the magic returned a disorienting answer: the spark was everywhere at once, present in every direction and at every distance within this chaotic realm. The party pressed on, circling the central keep in search of a ground-level entrance. The structure was an asymmetrical conglomerate of towers and domes connected by high walkways, and after half a circuit of its walls, it became clear there were no doors at ground level – whatever entrances existed were somewhere far above, accessible only by the walkways that linked the upper towers. Strange creatures drifted through the courtyard around them – a spider-like thing with humanoid legs waving in the air, a multi-eyed entity bristling with tentacles – but none approached. Not yet.
That changed when a skeletal horror spotted them. It was a towering mass of bony spikes, talons, and vestigial wings, and it moved with the deliberate, hateful purpose of something that existed for no reason other than to destroy. Ravenna acted quickly, weaving a spell that sharpened the party’s reflexes and sent a surge of speed through every one of them. The creature charged, and the courtyard erupted into chaos. Magnus swung his enchanted two-handed sword in a powerful arc, and Ravenna hammered the creature with repeated blasts of arcane crushing force that fractured its leg and shattered its back. Arlaina hurled a massive block of ice that slammed into the creature’s side and sent it staggering, and Sentinel Selarin managed a solid hit with his broadsword – only to be rewarded with a crushing blow that snapped his leg and left him crumpled on the cobblestones.
The creature turned its fury on Magnus next, delivering a devastating strike that sent him flying backward. He hit the ground hard but shook it off with the grim composure that defined him, rising and driving his blade deep into the creature’s chest with enough force to shatter bone. Ravenna continued her relentless assault, each arcane strike adding to the creature’s mounting injuries and forcing it to spend its energy defending rather than attacking. Rekha Mar-Khabazza, calling on a burst of supernatural speed, launched into a rapid flurry of strikes – most of which skittered off the creature’s bony hide or cut only shallow wounds. But the final strike was something else entirely.
With a leaping, precise thrust, Rekha Mar-Khabazza drove his rapier to the hilt into the creature’s neck, shattering the vertebrae that held its skull in place. The head separated from the body with a grinding crack and clattered down onto the cobblestones. The creature collapsed into a heap of corroded bone and dispersing dark energy, and the courtyard fell silent. The party stood amid the wreckage, still faintly hallucinating, bleeding from old wounds, and no closer to finding a way into the keep above them – but alive, and one step deeper into the heart of chaos.