Melchior’s Grand Tour: beyond the Cyclops’ cave there are the Elsewhere woods[7]
Once Awake, the group decided to go back to the cave, looking for the other dwarves. And for answers.
The dwarves weren’t able to put up their usual stoic demeanor.
Zair, the alchemist, was holding back the tears: he had a relationship made of banter and rivalry with the alchemist, a grumpy friendship but a true one. Omar, the interpreter, was becoming paranoid: the chief and all the others were gone, and they were the warriors. Omar clutched his arquebus, wary of everything. And everyone. He was surprised and worried to see Melchior and the strange girl so close: what if she was the real enemy? Maybe the nightmarish monster was her minion, or she is an illusionist or an enchantress, or she is an immortal prisoner of the Tartarus, now free.
Aminta felt the weight of responsibility: she was the de facto leader of the expedition. She was determined to honor her duty but wanted to go back to the surface as soon as possible. She was ashamed of herself for hoping to find the other dwarves dead.
Melchior was overexcited, gleeful anxious to understand the girl. He was intrigued by the puzzle, but there was also a genuine connection and an honest desire to help a lost soul.
The two found a way to communicate with speech, hand waving, and occasional drawing of pictures under the lantern’s light. He said they could call her Trina, a suggestive name not too far from her actual one.
They reached the skull cave. The blue light was dimmer, and the droning sound was quieter. Zair and Omar went to the ravine to pray for the Artificer. Dying in a foreign land without any chance to bring the boy back home is considered a tragedy. The alchemist threw an incendiary potion down the crevasse where his comrade fell, an impromptu pyre that hopefully would make his soul free to return home.
Aminta cast a small spell: thanks to her attunement with the underground environment, she can sense foreign objects, especially the living (or recently deceased) organisms. She didn’t perceive the dwarves but found many incongruous small things, small crumble of rubbish that flashed in her mind as clearly extraneous.
Thanks to his multifaceted education, Melchior could recognize a couple of these anomalies. There was a petal of a Blazing Cyclamin from the Ashen Steppe; the spikes of an Urchin Cactus of the Triton Peninsula; the thorns of a Starberry of the Ghost Forest.
Omar recognized the leaves of an Oniric Hortensia, an exotic plant from the Dream Landscapes of Uxali.
Trina explained that a grey feather was of a bird from her shores, the Hammergull.
There were also Conjuring Ants and the fur of a Double Fox.
Melchior had an epiphany: all these “things” came from places with spatial anomalies. The Ash Steppes, the Triton Peninsula, and the Dream Landscapes, all have shards of the transitional planes, the connective worlds between the hells, the heavens, and the other transcendent kingdoms. The Tartarus Peninsula has spatial distortions too. Trina lives on an island facing a line of magic that runs across the sea, “the other horizon”, as they call it. It causes people to get lost at sea, as it happened to her and her friends. The conjuring ants are famous for their teleporting abilities, and so are the double foxes.
Melchior then proposed his theory: the portal on the cyclops’ eyes leads to the Elsewhere Woods, the place where lost and forgotten things end up.
Melchior was reserved and phlegmatic for all the expeditions, and even when danger arose, he kept collected and calm. One could catch some hint of an internal turmoil, but it stayed wrapped under an aristocratic demeanor.
But after his epiphany, Melchior lit up with excitement: everything was falling into place. He was trying to be eloquent and articulate, but the words flew out of his mouth like freed parakeets. The rest of the group was disoriented by the barrage of concepts, but with some patience and many questions, they made Melchior explain himself.
The renewed activities in the underground, the same that bring Oozolina to the surface, must be connected to some “space warping” phenomena. Trina said that after her boat capsized she found herself in some woods. Since the small foreign things they found in the cave were stuff from many different environments, the portal in the cyclops’ skull must connect to a place with all those things, and there is only a place like that: the Elsewhere woods.
Omar the interpreter had objections: for him, the Elsewhere Woods was a mythical place, like when you lose a stocking you say “ it ended up in the Elsewhere woods”.
Aminta the ranger was convinced it was a metaphor: the woods are in the middle of the continent, far from everything, they are the proverbial remote destination (for example: “why are we taking this much time to get there? are we going to the Elsewhere woods?”).
Melchior explained that the place was both real and magical: many natural philosophers believe the Woods is a piece of crumbled space, like folding on a piece of paper that converge in a point. It is a sort of multiversal shard, like the piece of Tartarus around them, but it’s not a piece of hell or heaven, but a piece of the space itself.
Melchior continued to pontificate, starting to explain the theory of conjuring magic and the subspace under reality and the orcish cult of the void. The alchemist stopped him abruptly. Zair understood just one word every hundred but had a question: are our comrades beyond the portal? Melchior said a firm and adamant “yes”.
The climb to the top of the skull was relatively easy: there were some of the pegs used by the other dwarves, and Trina had some tips (she climbed down from there, after all). In a couple of hours, the group reached the summit. The eyesocket of the cyclops was like a tunnel with a light at the end. The light was small, or maybe just far: it wasn’t clear. Melchior, with a proud smile, put out the recorder the audiomage gave to him. He recorded the droning sound of the cave when it was the loudest, the first time they arrived, and now he was playing it back. The skull resonated, becoming brighter and emitting a sympathetic sound. The light at the end of the tunnel became bigger or closer, or both. It was now a passage.
On the other side of the opening, one could see a woodland landscape. They all carefully stepped to the other side.
It was what they were expecting, but they were still surprised: The green in front of them was lush and made of many different trees, possibly from all over the world. There were patches of tropical jungles and stripes of conifers forest, brambles from arid lands fading in wet fields of reeds.
Aminta felt still connected, still “at home” like the climate and air of the dungeons leaked outside. They looked around, and all was idyllic: strange insects flying around, unexpected scents, a fluffy white opossum floating around the vines like a small cloud…
But then a chilling screech: in front of them appeared a Brich Griffin. The predator is far from home, as it’s from the Infinite Forest, north of the Holy Inferna Empire, thousand miles from there.
The Griffin looked hungry and aggressive, maybe it was disoriented as the group was, or maybe it already made itself at home, knowing where to set an ambush to catch “newcomers”. what to do:
FIGHT! You are armed and that creature is much less frightening than the nightmare you faced before. It’s important to not lose sight of the entrance and get lost.
FLIGHT! The death of the Artificer scarred you, you don’t want to lose anybody else! Better go away, we have to start looking for the other dwarves anyway.
