The Wandering Isles: Session 61
The eruption began with Eos, but it ended with the island. For a brief, terrifying moment her eyes burned crimson and her voice carried words that made no sense, fragments of some other self. She stepped into the volcano’s core, slammed her scythe into the stone, and the Molten Crown trembled as lava surged. The party had no choice but to flee. Weslyn managed to seize her hand just as the ground gave way, thunder splitting the air as the two vanished and reappeared beside Hatsu. He clutched the Hearthstone, and together they escaped the collapsing mountain in a flash of magic.
But it was only when the chaos passed that they realised the true cost. Time itself had slipped from their grasp. They had entered on the fourth day of the first month of 1543. When they emerged, the celestial cycle suggested it was at least the eighth month. At a minimum, seven long months lost inside the Seal. However the environment of the Crescent Pearl suggested it may have been considerably longer.
The island they stood upon was not the place they remembered. The forest was whole, but sparkless, as though its life had been muted. Trees stood tall yet dulled, their leaves lacking vitality. Hatsu searched for signs of life, but there were no tracks, no voices, no movement but the wind. Weslyn peered towards the peak where he had once met an angel, and found it empty, abandoned. Even the grand building at the island’s heart was hollow, its halls silent. It felt less like a ruin and more like a body without a soul.
The silence pressed on them as they tried to orient themselves. Hatsu reached for the Telestones he had hidden here, desperate for some contact with his father, but no reply came. The wound of his father’s disappearance, unresolved since New Year’s eve, cut deeper now with this unanswered call. The group shared food, took uneasy rest, and spoke in quiet tones of what came next.
Their greatest concern was Vathros, the shadow freed when they had been pulled into the Seal. Somewhere, it now walked the world unbound. But they could not even begin the hunt until they escaped this place, and escape meant the sea. Amaedrianna’s RAFT, a strange mechanical prize, was their one hope of leaving the island. It was no ship, but with wood cut from the forest they might force it into service.
As they prepared, Weslyn reached out through magic to the mysterious fey for aid. The forest answered in an unexpected way. Hatsu disturbed a tree, and from its sap came a tiny, playful creature, unseen at first until it left a footprint glowing in the amber. It posed a riddle, delighted when they solved it, and accepted food, coins, and berries from the group. Content, it basked in the sun on a coin’s reflected light, and when it awoke it whispered advice: push the RAFT into the water, and seek a way to move it.
It was a fleeting spark of life in an island otherwise emptied of it. The silence, the missing months, the absence of Caelus, the unanswered stones – everything weighed heavy. With no sense of when they were, no clear knowledge of what had happened in their absence, and no certainty of what awaited them, they set their sights beyond the Arcanum. The place where it all began.
