Just after dawn, Jason, Lumi, and Kera met with Therissa in the Lodge’s common room. It had been decided by the Mayor that the three adventurers would not be sent unaided into the Crystal Wastes, for the three had no firsthand experience navigating the terrain there. While one of Kera’s books did, in fact, deal with the sorts of fantastic creatures that lived in places such as the Waste, simply reading about them was no substitute for actually having been there. A guide would be needed.

Therefore, the Mayor had decided to make a proper expedition of things. The three adventurers would provide escort for the two [Hunters], Aria and Belman, who would serve as the group’s guides, as well as provide an extra set of hands for harvesting any kills. At Tersk’s insistence, with a claim that ‘adventurers didn’t know good ore if they were staring right at it’, also joining them would be Tersk’s own son, Pelk, who possessed levels both as a [Miner] and as a [Stonecutter]. Last of all, one of the town’s few guardsmen, Serif, would be going with them so that someone could stay behind with the civilians in case the adventurers needed to deal with any monsters.

Privately, Jason assumed that the real reason Serif was sent along was that someone needed to be in charge of the horses while everyone else was working.

The first part of the trip involved a solid day’s journey to the west and south along the road. Jason was surprised that they were able to continue traveling long into the evening, but it had been Aria’s suggestion that in order to cut down on transit time, they make use of Lumiriel’s [Cantrips] to light the way.

They camped late that evening just at the edge of the woods, where the terrain gradually turned to grasslands dotted with the occasional low hill.

The following morning saw the group continuing along the road, which slowly wove between hills until it came upon a long, low ridge that stretched across the horizon.

“There’s our destination for the evening,” Belman said. He pointed up the ridge, where a small set of low buildings could be made out just at the crest. “Us locals refer to that as Wasteland Station, a rest house for caravans that are willing to make the crossing. Not many are these days, so the place is a bit run-down.”

“It’s still morning though,” Jason commented. He squinted and shielded his eyes against the sun that was off to his left, looking up at the ridge to the south. “Will it really take us all day to get up there? It doesn’t look that far to me.”

“No, we’ll be there by late afternoon,” Aria said. “The real reason we’re stopping then is you do not want to be out in the open in the Wastes at night if you can help it. That’s when the shard drakes are at their most active, and we do not want to meet one of them.”

Belman agreed with Aria. “They’re nothing like your little friend over there,” he said with a nod in Ceri’s direction. “Shard drakes are massive beasties, easilly bigger than you and your horse combined. You don’t want to cross one. Like a lot of the things out there on the other side, they’re attracted to noise, so most people crossing the Wastes travel during the day, and at night they stick to the ruins of the old towns and temples that used to be out here before the dungeon took them over.”

“A dungeon?” asked Kera.

Serif spat rudely on he ground from the back of his horse, clearing his throat.

“Tha’s right.” He said. “Don’t know ‘bout when, but most folks around here know the story. Long time ago this used t’be the seat of a kingdom. Damnfools tried to raise their own dungeon like some kinda livestock. They wanted to use it to farm gemstones, outfit their soldiers with the best gear around, get em leveled up real high.”

“‘Cept they underestimated it,” Serif continued. “Crystal dungeons are a kind of earth theme, yeah? Means the monsters in it are good at burrowin’. It spread its roots far and deep before making its move. Once the dungeon was strong enough to start raiding, it made new entrances. Claimed and Tunneled its way right up into some of the nearby towns, and started dragging people away into it before anybody even knew what was happening.”

“Whole towns disappeared practically overnight, caught unprepared. ‘S why folks are so scared. It can come sudden-like. The Mayor has the right idea to draw up stocks of water and then seal up the wells and set a watch on ‘em til the dungeon’s dealt with; they could come right up through them into the middle of town.”

Jason shuddered, imagining a horde of raging fishmen dashing through the town, with a huge Sobek standing by to drag hapless villagers back into the well to a watery doom.

“I’m assuming the dungeon in the Wastes is long gone?” asked Lumi.

“Oh aye,” Pelk cut in. “The nations to either side killed it in the end, but not before the dungeon swallowed up a good swath of the countryside and two dozen towns and villages along with it. The nation that created it in the first place was destroyed, and the nation that used to exist on our side of the place spent so much in the way of resources trying to destroy that abomination that they fractured into civil war afterwards, leaving us with the free cities we’ve got today.”

“By then, the natural mana of the region was so screwed up and saturated with out of control earth-aspect that even without the presence of the dungeon, the area keeps on generating its own variant of the dungeon’s natural corruption, so nobody can live in the region.”

“Corruption?” Jason asked, alarmed. “Aren’t we in danger from that?”

“Nah,” Aria said dismissively. “Only if you’re here for an extended period, on the order of months, and just leaving the region would be good enough to set you right again unless you stayed way longer. And don’t worry, in all my life it’s never spread beyond the ridge, and this place has been around a lot longer than I have.”

Jason let out a sigh of relief as they began to make their way up to the top of the ridge.

“So what are we here for, anyway?” he asked. “I’ve got the quest for some radiant iron and some prism chitin, but what else are we looking for?”

Pelk answered first. “Well it’s lots of things, really. Plenty of value to be had here in the Wastes thanks to the over abundance of mana, but in addition to your radiant iron, there’s precious stones, earthheart, luminite, mana crystals, you name it. This place is a goldmine for that sort of stuff.”

“Probably plenty of other stuff you [Hunters] are after too, yeah?” He asked with a questioning glance at Aria and Belman.

“That’s right,” Aria answered. “Prism hide and chitin, and bloodgems to name the main ones. A few other things that are useful for weapons, like the fangs of a crystal serpent, or the blade-feathers of an onyx eagle. Depends on what we run into really.”

They began to cross the last of the grasslands, and reached the slopes of the ridge by noon. Travel upwards was slow going, as the wide road wound its way back back and forth up the ridge, finding its way past huge moss-covered boulders that Jason thought looked like the remnants of an ancient battle between giants. But eventually they reached the top, where they were greeted by the site of a set of three, quaint-looking, overly-large log cabins nestled in a rocky outcrop where they were mostly shielded from the weather

Then there was the view.

Jason pulled his horse to a stop and stared down at the scene before him.

The road swept down the other side of the ridge towards a vast, open plain bereft of trees and grasses of any kind. Instead, great, man-sized growths of quartz and limestone jutted up from the soil, dotting the landscape like a bizarre form of cacti. The very ground itself shone with light: the dark, dry dirt reflected a constellation of a thousand different colors in the afternoon light.

Nothing moved in the slightest, except for the roving patterns of refracting sunlight, and a slight breeze that kicked up bits of loose dirt and sand as it swept across the landscape.

“It’s... strangely beautiful.” Lumi commented, awed.

“What causes all the colors?” Jason asked.

“Tourmaline, lad,” Pelk answered, pulling up alongside them. “You’re looking at the greatest source of tourmalines in the entire world. The very soil itself is chock full of ever-so-tiny broken up fragments of the stuff. That’s what causes all the different colors; the soil here has been partially changed into all manner of different forms of crystals. Quartz, tourmaline, calcite, sandstone... you name it. Tales tell of whole caverns turned into gigantic geodes the likes of which you’ve never seen.”

“How is it possible that no one’s laid claim to all this?” Jason asked. “Surely there’s a fortune to be made here doing it.”

Pelk laughed at him. “Aye, and what would you eat, lad? Can’t hunt. Not only would most stuff out there kill an average man without much trouble, you can’t eat rocks. Not unless you’re a troll, anyway.”

“Couldn’t you use irrigation, or aqueducts to farm the slopes up here? Set up nearby mining?”

Pelk shook his head. “Nope. Can’t do that either. Pick up a handful of yon soil and have a taste,” he said. “Go on, I promise it won’t hurt ya.”

Jason dismounted, and picked up a pinch of thin, browning dirt. He touched his tongue tentatively to it, and immediately spat it back out with a grimace.

It was like sticking his tongue into a vat of table salt.

Pelk laughed uproariously at Jason as he spat repeatedly to clear out the taste. He passed Jason his waterskin so he could wash his mouth out.

Jason did so.

“Now you understand,” Pelk said. “The answer’s salt, lad. Halite, your common rock salt, is a crystal too. The soil’s full of the stuff. It dries out the land and kills off your crops. Even if you did manage to get water up here, your plants would build up toxic levels of salt, and then after awhile they’d start to mutate too, to boot.”

Pelk then passed Jason a small flask. “Here, this’ll clean out the taste. Careful, it’s strong stuff.”

Jason took a small swig, and coughed as it burned its way down his throat. The whiskey had a strange berry flavor to it was nevertheless quite pleasant.

He passed the flask back to Pelk.

“You’re forgetting the corruption,” Pelk said as he tucked his flask back into his bag. “It affect plants too. Sure, you could rotate the people in and out, but not the crops. And theres the monsters too. Mana saturation isn’t just in the ground either, it spreads all throughout the air, down the slopes, everything. That grass we came through can tolerate the higher salt levels on the slopes of the region, but most plants can’t. Arnvale’s really the closest you can conceivably be without needing to worry about all sorts of problems that make it prohibitively expensive to build out here.”

“So instead you occasionally get people like us to make occasional forays, small trips to gather what they can in safety, and then export it elsewhere,” concluded Jason.

“Exactly. In fact, my own family’s your most common customer, there,” the dwarf said.

“All right, enough standing around jawing about history,” Belman said. “Let’s get ourselves squared away. Our target is only half a day’s ride out from here. If at all possible, I’d like to spend only one full day camped in the ruins before we head back, to minimize risk. Also it means we’ll be back home in our beds before the week is out. So take some time off now for yourselves, relax, do you, et cetera. We’ll head for the ruins with the dawn.”

Everyone nodded, and separated into groups to pick out rooms in the cabins. Jason, Lumi, and Kera took one for themselves, while Aria and Belman took another, and Pelk and Serif took the last. The cabins didn’t have any windows, instead relying on a series of pipes for ventilation and a stone fireplace for heating. Kera managed to somehow acquire a large wooden tub from someplace, and even managed to talk Lumi into filling and heating it so the three of them could take baths in shifts in the last unused room.

Once evening came, everyone met outdoors and prepared a simple, campfire-cooked communal stew of roasted meats and vegetables, plus fruits and cheeses, all kept fresh courtesy of the preservation charm on Jason’s pack.

All in all, it was an enjoyable, relaxing evening for everyone involved, and a welcome rest to Jason and Kera, who had never ridden horseback before and didn’t have a skill like Lumi did to rely on to help them avoid sore muscles.

The ride down into the Wastes themselves the next morning was uneventful. Small puffs of dry sand, salt, and dirt were disturbed as the horses made their way along the ‘road’ that passed through the reason. Jason felt it qualified more as a trail than a road, as it apparently hadn’t been maintained for centuries. But the lack of wet weather and absence vegetation had left it mostly intact in any case.

Belman had passed out sets of tinted glass goggles to everyone that morning, including fitting them to the horses. By the time noon came around, Jason was glad of them, uncomfortable as they were; apparently the constant reflection of sunlight off the crystals permeating the area could cause the equivalent of snow blindness. Even with the goggles, the glare was fairly strong if he happened to catch the light at the wrong angle.

Sometime in the early afternoon they arrived at their destination: an old, walled temple complex dedicated to some deity Jason didn’t inquire about. Most of the towers had collapsed, and the walls long crystallized into a kind of black-and-brown marbled sandstone. Here and there the same gigantic quartz crystals sprouted up amidst the rubble, almost like weeds that were growing up and over the ruin.

Belman led the group into what used to be the central courtyard, surrounded on all sides by walls. A wide, open slope large enough to fit horses in had at some point been dug down into a breached cellar that lay several feet below the surface.

Then he called for a halt.

“Alright, Lumi,” Belman said, waving Jason and the others forwards. “Your lot are up first. Make sure the cellar is clear before we set up camp down there.”

“Understood,” the girl replied, dismounting. She passed her reins to Aria, and drew her sword.

Jason and Kera dismounted likewise, readying their weapons and passing their reins to one of the civilians while Serif drew his own saber and remained on his horse.

Lumi began by ordering Kera to send Ceri to take a brief look into the cellar, followed by sending Jason on a brief circuit around the inner courtyard to make sure nothing was lurking just out of sight.

He didn’t find anything, but Kera did.

“Head’s up,” she said. “Ceri’s spotted some scarabs already. Quite a few, so I’m betting there’s nests.”

Belman grunted in affirmation. “Usually is, anytime people pass through here. The things like to dig down underneath old structures and make burrows to lair in. That’s where we’ll find the iron.”

“How big are the tunnels?” Kera asked as she called Ceri back to her. “These ones don’t look larger than a good sized dog. How big do they get?”

“Those’re adults,” Aria answered her. “And the tunnels are only just big enough for us to crawl through to get into the nests. Don’t worry about that though. Pelk here has fun tool to drive them all out when we’re ready.”

Pelk gave her a gleeful grin. “Aye, that I do.”

“Jason, Kera, behind me,” Lumi ordered as she activated her elemental shield. “I’ll take point. I’ll keep pushing them back with Geyser. Kera, you pin down stragglers with a [Thorn Trap], and the Jason, you and Ceri can pick them off safely. Sound good?”

Kera gave her the usual exaggerated, cheerful salute while Jason simply nodded, twirling his shadowbolt wand with one hand.

Lumi switched her shield from its fire form to a more solid frost one that had a single large spike of ice jutting from the front. She began to advance down the slope into the cellar, where she immediately threw out a mage-light so the they could see.

As they stepped past gap in the sandstone walls, Jason caught sight of the scarabs for the first time. Just as Kera had described, the insects were the size of a very large dog. If Jason were to stand next to one it would reach halfway up his thigh, easilly capable of bowling one of them over were it to charge. Four large, elongated spines - or perhaps legs; it was hard to tell - stretched in front of its head, sharpened into hard points. The shells of the scarabs were a riot of color, constantly fluctuating like oil on water, with unrefined chunks of gemstone studding their backs like additional armor.

The reaction to the adventurers’ presence was immediate. Several of the scarabs fled through a door into a carved stone passageway at the back of the cellar, while three of the beetles turned to face the invaders.

The middle one rushed Lumi, who responded by summoning a spire of ice straight out of the ground between them, causing the scarabs to leap to the side to avoid being impaled. This brought the creature right in front of one of the others, and Kera took the opportunity to conjure up a tangle of thorny vines underneath it. A moment later, the scarab’s movements set off the trap, wrapping itself and the scarab behind it a tangle of vines they couldn’t escape.

Jason took his shots. Each beetle took two hits, but they were pinned in place, so he was able to fire off four shots in quick succession. The third and final beetle was not so fortunate as the first, and found itself impaled mid-leap on Lumi’s second spike.

“Well that was a rather easy,” commented Kera. She checked her character sheet. I got almost nothing from that. Nothing compared to those fish guys.”

“Don’t say things like that,” Jason groaned. “Do you want to get devoured by a swarm of hundreds of dog-sized bugs? Not a good way to go.”

“Thankfully,” Kera replied, “My book says that prism scarabs are too big to come in swarms.”

Jason groaned again, facepalming. “Now you’ve really gone and jinxed us.”

“Oh hush, you,” Lumi said. “Go and make sure there’s no other entrances besides that door. We can seal it off and make camp here until we’re ready to go deeper.”

Jason made a quick circuit of the room before motioning the others to begin leading the horses into the huge, overly large space. He wondered if it had once stored casks of wine or other such things, for even with the horses, there was still plenty of space to move about and pitch a decent camp.

Both Aria and Belman had both brought some canvas sheets for that very purpose. They set Kera and Serif to putting up some peaked tents right there in the cellar using poles jammed into the floor, while they used other sheets to lay down a wall across the gap in the wall to prevent light from a fire from attracting predators. Meanwhile, together with Pelk’s assistance Lumi managed to get the door leading further into the complex closed and sealed off with ice magic. It wouldn’t hold against a determined assault, but would last long enough for them to tear down the canvas and make a getaway if need be.

Meanwhile, the two [Hunters] got to work harvesting the three scarab carcasses. Fortunately, Lumi and Kera were able to dismiss the effects of their spells, so they didn’t have to wrestle the scarabs out from under the thorns or off the ice. They dragged the bodies out of the cellar up to the surface, where they set about with both small picks and chisels, carving off what passed for chitin for the creatures, as well as setting aside the occasional bloodgem.

When Jason joined them to assist, he was informed that the stones were particularly prized by [Hunters] like themselves, because they possessed a special property that when crafted into weapons, bloodgems granted the weapon a lesser form of the heart-seeking enchantment, and thus made excellent arrowheads.

Upon analyzing them, he learned two new traits.

Bloodgem Traits Discovered: Seeking, Blood.

The chitin of the insects had a new trait as well.

Prism Chitin Trait Discovered: Prismatic.

Jason wasn’t quite sure what that might mean, but he had a theory; in games, ‘Prismatic’ effects usually meant some kind of randomized component, like different energy attacks, or a grab-bag effect where different colors meant different spells. He’s have to do some experimenting to find out.

Until then however, he’d have to wait. They had a job to do.