Eric of Hollow Peak. Boy, does that sound pretentious. I suppose it isn’t as bad as “Tal of Storms” or the crazy title the dwarves gave him. Anyway, Mr “of Storms” asked me to recount what I remember from my experience of “The Etney.”

Dwarves. Everything needs to have some over-the-top name. It's a weird indulgence for an otherwise to-the-point people.

I’m not one to boast, but Tal did me a good turn or two, and I figured it wasn’t too much of a bother.

Where to start? My name is Eric, I said that already. I’m from a city named Hollow Peak, but was once called Altian. Altian was renowned the world over for our magical trinkets. Did you need a pocket that was bigger on the inside than the outside? Then we were the place to go—only, we didn’t really invite people in, instead teleporting our goods all over the world and charging extra for the 'convenience.' That's all old news. Tal asked me to write about that as well, but I’m probably not going to write that one. He can visit and find out the history for himself.

Though, I do need to start with a tiny bit of history, for context.

When the Flood occurred, my people did what one does when what one does is specialize in Spatial magic and has access to a mountain of spatial affinity quartz. We hollowed out a cave, made the inside much, much, much, bigger than the outside, teleported the whole city inside, and then sealed the entrance with an overly elaborate warded gate set to lock when the water rose up to it and only open if the water subsided

It didn't all go smoothly. Big surprise. Who could have foreseen that transporting a city and the surrounding wilderness into an enclosed cave would have ecological ramifications? The worshipers of Assuine, that's who. They had of course pointed out the glaring flaws in the plan all along the way, but the mages who ruled ignored the warnings of the "uneducated."

It only took a few rounds of dysentery and other easily preventable disasters for the mages to come to them for help. Soon, those that studied Assuine’s gifts were added to the ruling counsel and some changes were enacted. For the last 700 or so years, they have been nurturing a perfectly balanced bottled ecosystem.

That's what my parents did. I just fed the phase spiders. We used to call them giant spiders, but a couple of hundred years after the Relocation, they started to disappear. The spider’s silk was almost a perfect reagent for the crafting of magical items, and was the secret to Altian’s success. Once they became Primal creatures, their silk only got better. And then two generations back, we began to become Primals as well. Not all of us, but enough.

I am a spider-wrangler by necessity, warrior by passion, Primal by proximity, and wizard by cultural expectations. This odd combination likely was the source of my escape. Not many still practiced martial arts or magical combat. For all its faults, the Hollow Peak was nearly a utopia. Everyone had to contribute in some way to meet their quota, and training yourself for a battle no one expected to come, surprisingly, did not contribute to the greater good. So, I gained the illustrious job of spider-wrangler. It was typically a punishment detail, but I’d grown up near the spiders and did not share the aversion to the giant hairy eight legged guys as everyone else. It was a necessary job with low time commitment and ample opportunity to train. Perfect for me.

There was little crime, more than enough to eat, and ample opportunity for study and growth, so long as you wanted to study more ways to expand a hyper-compressed dimensional space or grow more nutrient-rich foods. Much like my forebears, I didn’t think this situation would work out as well as those around me. It seemed too good to be true. The previous world had gone from utopia to ruin, from empire to floods and fire. Why would this one last?

So, I prepared. People said I was mad, that the floods could not be stopped, and that we were safe in our home. I didn’t believe them. Plenty of texts remained on martial arts, so I trained in my free time. Books of combat magic were easy to come by. No one wanted to invest the time to learn them as none of them had been converted to spellforms, but time was on my side. Being a Spatial Primal, I had been born with a higher reserve of Will than most, and had completed my bridge far in advance of my classmates. Even at a young age, I feared contact with the outside world. When my peers finally moved to learn the spells necessary to maintain our home, I had long been on the path of studying traditional combat magic, using my connection to the Font of Space shamelessly to my advantage. This was the real beginning of my isolation.

People were not receptive to my constant treaties for more organized training regimes for the populace. By the time I’d turned twenty, I was largely ignored. But, that's alright. It will be satisfying when I go back and show them that I was right. I am not above shameless bragging and self-adulation.

I’ll probably get a parade. They love parades.

Anywho, one day, Cuff, my favorite phase spider charge, was acting very odd. He woke me up one morning in my room which shouldn't have been possible without raising a big alarm.

A plan had been in the works for a while by then, but it wasn’t necessarily my best idea. I'd been ready for some time to Bond Cuff as my familiar, but the chance of angering the few who still tolerated me stayed my hand. It wasn’t exactly allowed, but it wasn’t forbidden either... mostly because it shouldn’t have worked. Familiars needed to be small or willing, magical, and slightly less small. He was two of three, and I thought our joint connection to the Font of Space filled in that last gap in magical theory.

I was right.

As soon as I’d completed the spell Binding us together, my mind was barraged with images of Cuff pestering me as I went about my day. Images I did not recall. The sheer volume of them is what threw me. A few interactions here or there could have been explained by a lapse in memory, but not dozens or hundred. One example showed him capturing me in a web. Another he bit off my finger.

The ritual had taken all day, and then, suddenly, Cuff grew stiff, then latched onto me and phased out into the Ethereal Realm.

That was a new experience. We appeared atop a mountain that looked very familiar from pre-Relocation artwork and immediately began to tumble down towards the water below. Well, I did. Cuff let me fall, and slowly descended behind me. Without conveying any thoughts through our new Bond, he grabbed onto me once more, and phased us back home. Only it wasn’t home. I was still in the water on the side of a mountain.

I’d left the Hollow Peak. I will not bore you with the details, but I freaked out a little bit. Maybe a lot. I explored the area, and found the cave that had been enlarged to fit my home. Spider webs coated the cavern and water covered the ground, but only about a foot. I waded through the choppy pools, fighting through the thick webs, and found the great gate at the end. The door that “protected” my people from the eternally rising tides.

Then, I broke out in laughter, there in the water-filled cave. The great flood had come, but had stopped just short of our doorstep. Literally. If I could have opened the door, there would have been a grand staircase going up a dozen yards. The door could disappear, and no one in the Hollow Peak would have even noticed.

I told Cuff to let me back in, and to his credit he tried, but he couldn’t do it. He brought me to the Ethereal Realm, but whenever he tried to bring me back, I would only appear outside the Peak. He on the other hand could move back and forth freely.

I spent a week on that barren mountain top. A very miserable week. Every night Cuff would rush to me, latch on, and drag me to the Ethereal Plane, only to bring me back a moment later. Something was happening to the world, and my presence in the Ethereal Realm somehow protected me. Cuff brought me food from home, and each day it disappeared. He brought me my weapons, which stayed around so long as I held them on my person. If I placed them down on the ground though, they were prone to disappear into a cloud of black ash. I could never make out a pattern for the behavior.

The whole week I was visited by phase spiders off and on. This mountain, it seemed, was their secret home. They regularly disappeared back home, and we assumed it was to stay in the Ethereal, but they were really coming here. For whatever reason, Cuff was not able to bring me back through. When I examined the gate in the Ethereal, it had a heavy presence. It was visibly denser somehow. Like I was staring at all the space that was compressed into that cave, all at once. My guess was that Cuff couldn’t navigate his way back in there with me as a burden.

I tried using my own Spatial magic to teleport in, but the wards kept me out.

Eventually, we gave up trying to get back in, and set off to sea. That went poorly. I made a terrible raft from driftwood. I knew nothing about the ocean, and the raft disappeared the next time the world reset. That left me stranded in the Ethereal Realm at sea, which turned out to be not so bad.

The water there was more of an idea than a rule. We sank to the ocean floor and walked as if on land. Once down there, we couldn't risk returning without being crushed by the pressure, so we walked.

And walked.

And walked.

Fought some spirit monster things and then kept walking.

We didn't grow tired or hungry, and saw many beautiful and horrifying sites. Apart from the sky, which is like staring into the Arcane Realm, the Ethereal Realm is like looking at a dozen versions of the world overlaid atop each other. The more permanent a structure, the clearer and more real it was there, but a shipwreck for example is only tangible if you really focus on it. Time passes differently for the objects native there and not entirely in sync with the Material Realm, but our own timelines seemed locked in step with our home.

Beings in the Material Realm appear as colorful wisps in the Ethereal. Magical effects and items too are visible from there, less clear than people but more clear than non magical creatures. Ensouled artifacts look more like people than magical items or effects, and if you want them enough, you can pull them over to the other side. Or maybe it must be them that wants you? I saw plenty in shipwrecks beneath the ocean, but only managed to grab one, and I can tell you I wanted them all. Except for the one that looked like a sewing needle. I hate sewing.

We found a dozen lost cities and a hundred lost towns before I found a mountain range to climb. We planned to climb until we saw the wisps of people and knew that it was safe to return. We reached the top, found no one and traversed the peaks ever upward until we encountered a small patch of life nestled in a hidden valley and surrounded by a yellow gold circle of light. At first I was hesitant to cross the ward that was visible in the Ethereal, but Cuff went right through it without concern. I followed him, and we hopped back into a quaint little village. It had a handful of small stone cottages with slate roofs, with rain barrels set up below to catch the run off. Each home had raised bed gardens to grow vegetables in the rocky mountains. The villagers all stopped in their tracks at my appearance in the center of town. I froze too, from a different sort of alarm.

Each villager had skin tones ranging from light pink to deep purple, and some combination of horned heads, batlike wings, or lizard-like tail. Many had all three.

Demonkin.

Cuff sensed my panic and pulled me back to the Ethereal where we waited until the wisps blinked out only to reappear elsewhere, signifying a reset, to return. I stole some stale bread, which is amazing if you haven't eaten for months, and hid in a shed until I heard a voice.

A young girl's voice spoke out from behind me in an unfamiliar language.

Wow, Trish was right. This magic memory enhancing paper is trippy. I can hear Aliza clear as day.

“Bah!” I screamed, and ran from the shed looking for Cuff.

I found him on the roof, content to let a demonkin ambush me. A young demonkin child of around five stepped out the shed behind me.

Oh, it's just a kid. Wait, a demon kid. Shouldn’t she be a feral monster?

“Why aren’t you attacking me?” I asked.

The girl only tilted her head in confusion, not understanding my words.

“Eeeek!” a voice screamed from behind along with a command.

I turned, even more confused to see a demonkin woman looking out the back window of a cottage, terror clear on her face.

Why am I the scary one?

“Cuff! Get us out of here!” I commanded my familiar.

He complied and we waited the day out in the Ethereal. The next morning, I approached the town in the open. A low stone wall lined the village, beyond which was a perfectly flat ring of stone that coincided with the ward I’d seen.

I waited at the wall until some very suspicious, but not martially intimidating demonkin arrived holding crude weapons. To summarize a long and awkward conversation in broken Rilith, this village was populated by a group of demonkin that were immune to the influence of Faust. They wouldn’t explain why, but they also never left the circle of the ward that surrounded their village, so it wasn’t exactly spatial compression mechanics to figure it out.

It took a few resets of trying, mostly with me trying to better learning their language, but I eventually convinced them I meant them no harm. The fact that I eventually became near fluent in what I would learn was Demonic was the biggest reason for their acceptance. They never told me the secret of their ward, only saying their protection from corruption was a gift.

I stayed in that village for a few months, but eventually decided that I needed to move on. I’d decided on a path, once I’d learned that others had survived the flood. I was going to get a mage to open up the portal to my home, and open the doors to my people. I just needed to find one.

I continued on through the mountains, and found many more of such villages in hidden caves, valleys, and isolated peaks. Each was more welcoming than the last as both my fluency and familiarity with their customs grew. They were by and large peaceful people, far from the crazed ravagers I’d heard of in legends. They lived simple lives in the mountains in secret and somehow produced everything they needed in a barren place of stone. Every town I found had a similar ward around it, and each group of people refused to discuss it no matter what I said or did.

My tenth or so such village broke the pattern. Traveling the Ethereal, Cuff and I found yet another city circled by yellow gold wards, only this one had wisps inspecting it.

Eager to see the demonkin working on the wards, I had Cuff bring us into the Material, but instead of a group of peaceful demonkin, I saw a group of redcaps busy at work digging into the smooth patch of stone that hid the ward.

Without thought, I drew my sword and pierced the nearest in the chest while sending fire through my blade which spread to those around him.

They aborted their work and turned to send their own magic against me, but Cuff ambushed them with a web, allowing me to finish them off. When the town woke, I asked them about the slain forsaken, but they grew silent. One ran into the largest cottage and rang a bell, and they spent the rest of the day expectant and on guard for some unknown event.

The following days, I slew the redcaps without alerting the townsfolk and looked at the bell myself. It was the same yellow gold of the ward when examined in the Ethereal. As with all magic items, faint wisps flew off of it into the sky towards the distant Fonts from which they drew power. When I asked about it in the Material Realm, everyone once more grew silent and I was politely but sternly asked to leave.

The next day, I let the redcaps finish their work to see what would happen. The town went mad. The ward, as I suspected, kept out Faust’s corruption, and with it gone the demonkin reverted to how I’d first expected them to behave. They became feral and slew the redcaps, though the redcaps took most of the village with them. Even mad, they had but crude weapons and little experience. Though It did revealthat each demonkin had magic abilities I’d yet to observe. Mostly simple elemental spells, usually fire, but the headwoman cast an honest-to-goodness Fireball.

The next day, I left. I couldn’t stay there every day to save them, nor could I bear to watch that occurrence once more. I vowed to find a way to help them, but I had a prior commitment to keep. I continued along the range, and every village I found thereafter was much the same. Forsaken forces struck each, destroying the wards and often engaging in battle, though that seemed to not have been the plan. As I went, the villager grew larger, until I found one isolated valley in which a city lay hidden. It was at war, and something like a god was at its back. I encountered the city early morning, and a battle had been raging for hours. The conflict was visible in the Ethereal from far off, for all the magic was lighting up the sky.

This city did not have a yellow gold ring of wards around it, but a sort of hazy dome of that same light that encapsulated the area. In the Ethereal Realm, I was safe to walk through the battle with impunity. The forsaken forces were amassing outside while herding kobolds and goblins into the city as fodder. I didn’t know what each wisp was at the time, but on later distant observations I learned the details.

The godlike being in the center of the city shone like the sun. Beams of light shot from him, whipping enemy wisps from existence by the hundreds. Wherever it hit a building or stone, the target of the attack became more real in the Ethereal. I don’t know how many times this battle had been waged in the Material Realm before I encountered it, but the Ethereal Realm near this battle had a solidity and weight that almost made me believe I was back in the Material Realm.

The demonkin fought alongside their champion, holding back the forsaken forces in alleys and streets. The target of the invaders was the object at the center of the city which emitted the dome of light. Like the other towns and villages, the attackers sought to destroy the ward protecting the demonkin from Faust’s taint.

When the forsaken finally invaded themselves, they came with powerful magic, and the sky lit up with a rainbow of spells. Another brilliant figure heralded their invasion. This one flew, and looked like a black hole of eternal darkness. It radiated hostility and anger, and it bathed the city in waves of black as it flew through it. A dragon.

At its arrival, the golden figure leapt into the air and grew, larger and larger, until it rivaled and then dwarfed the invading wyrm. The two auras flew together and blended into a single orb of yellow and black in the sky. Light and darkness flashed out in all directions, but soon the black light winked out, and the yellow returned to the frey. It flew through the city, breathing light upon all those that did not flee. Soon, the demonkin retreated to their homes, forcing the forsaken out to the street for their draconic defender to scour from existence.

I decided to watch the battle from many angles in the Ethereal before risking entering the Material. Part of me wondered if Cuff and I had been here before in the past, only to die and return home, doomed to repeat ourselves. And maybe we had, for while I watched the battle, one day something changed. The dragon defender of the demonkin vanished in a flash of magic. He was not gone for long, but his brief absence was devastating on the demonkin’s forces. The forsaken breached their defenses without yellow-gold to defend them. When he returned, they were already at work dismantling the ward at the heart of the city.

The dragon did not need his demonkin servants to win though. When the ward was almost lost, it let loose. It bathed the city with light, erasing everything it touched from existence, even destroying their shadows in the Ethereal. When the battle was over, all that remained was the golden light in a valley devoid of life.

I did not remain to watch this again, and fled ever eastward in the mountains. I passed more small demonkin villages, but continued on. At last, I found signs of civilization that were neither demonkin nor dragon. Down below the mountain, on the side opposite the ocean, I saw the wisps of men scurrying in and out of a cave down below. I descended, and undercover of night, saw a mix of humans and dwarves load supplies onto and off river ferries. What I’d first thought to be a cave turned out to be a gate cut into the mountain. When I tried to enter, the way was barred with some wars that's protection went beyond the Material, and for the first time I couldn't explore the Ethereal to my heart's content.

I followed the ferries down river in the Material, marveling at the abundance of life around me in the forest. The ferries lead to a town that was small but growing. The forest I’d marveled at had been cut back for miles to feed the unending demand for lumber of this burgeoning city. Out of caution, I explored the city in the Ethereal to ensure no battle would break out before entering on foot.

For weeks I explored the city, trying new and strange foods unknown to my home while searching for signs of a mage that could help my people. A small contingent of wizards from “The Tower” resided in the town, though they were not welcomed, but tolerated, by the people. I was hesitant to approach them before better understanding the lay of the land.

My surveillance was broken when I walked into the town’s capital, only for a gruff voice to call out, “Hey! What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here.”

I turned to the voice to explain that I was lost, and saw a pair of dwarves staring at me with eyes wide. Their shocked look forestalled my flimsy excuse of being lost. The building was public, and many people traveled in and out. I looked myself over for signs that would make me stand out, but could see none. Before I could explain, the ground rose up around me and I was trapped.

The rest, Tal, I think you already know from Ludvik and Deshiv, so I will give my cramped hand a rest and leave it at that.