Riloth the 19th the 401st

The process of reaching the Dahn was significantly hampered by the demon's ongoing campaign of burning the world. Potions of fire resistance were formulated to aid adventures in combat, and they have no protection for smoking inhalation. There are potions that allow people to hold their breath for hours, but Levar lacked those ingredients. They were not popular. Apparently holding your breath for an hour is significantly more uncomfortable than breathing in water once you get used to it with a potion of water breathing.

The solution came from sorcery. My proficiency with Air had grown greatly, and I could produce a Vortex large enough to encompass Dagmar. It took some trial and error to make the spell powerful enough to keep out the smoke, but weak enough to not disrupt Dagmar's footing.

We each brought two potions of fire resistance with us, one to get to the Kituh, and the other to get to the Dahn. Each morning we rescued Bearskin, recruited Levar by telling each of them a partial truth, and went out to slay the wizard and Fanos for Dagmar's magic sword. The first day we waited them out, but thereafter I used Dispel Magic to destroy their dome and steal their belongings. We even left them alive and asleep, though the fire may have gotten them after we left.

I had the capacity for ten spells in my mental vault now and used them for Lightning, Magic Missile, Light, Shield, Mage Armor, Mend, Clean, Mind Spike, Dispel Magic, and Counter Spell.

Mend was not useful, but it didn't feel right to relinquish the last spell I had of my mother's. If I wasn't sentimental, I would have used Sending. If I'm being honest, Clean was impractical as well, but it felt good to go about your day free of the smell of smoke so I classified it as essential for our mental health.

A test had shown my Will capacity had increased to sixty three, and I'd learned to cast spells into the Will gauge to measure their costs. Magic Missile had cost 2.5. Sorcery couldn't be measured in such a manner, but Will costs were a simple matter of benchmarking them with additional math. I didn't do this at the time, though. We were eager to begin.

The first day we found the Dahn, the fires were still raging around it. Dagmar, for once, proved the more useful forest navigator. With all the landmarks lost to the smoke and flames, Dagmar's dead reckoning was our fallback. She'd improved her overland navigation abilities to the point where she could manage if we walked slow.

With no ceremony, we chugged our potions as we approached the Dahn jumped right in.

"Intruder detected,” the disembodied voice echoed as we entered.

Dagmar ran straight for Timothy as I unloaded one of each wand charge into the golems, interrupting the countdown and sending the room into darkness. I cast Light over myself, illuminating most of the room as Timothy and Jimothy charged.

Dagmar met Timothy near the fountain in the center of the grand foyer. The golem swung down at the dwarf with his left club-like arm, and Dagmar jumped out of the way, striking out at the arm with her Will draining sword. The sword hit with a resounding clank followed by the crumbling of stone. With the enhanced strength, the sword drove deeply into the stone, doing more damage than Dagmar’s old attacks could do with the runed war picks.

I followed her attack with one of my own, sending a barrage of Magic Missiles into Timothy’s healed and unblemished chest.

Jimothy reached me at the door while Dagmar traded blows with her foe. He’d charged with his arm cocked back, ready for a jab, and swung for me as he came into range. With a Wind Jump, I leapt out of the way and sent another attack at Timothy around Jimothy’s back. These three struck the golem on his arm as she turned to face Dagmar, who’d just struck him in the pack with her war pick.

The enhanced strike sent a grapefruit sized chunk of stone flying from the hip of the golem and Dagmar let out a “Whoop!”

I led Jimothy on a chase around the perimeter of the circular room, peppering Timothy with more Magic Missiles and assisting Dagmar with Gusts as I went. Dagmar struck the golem two more times, before the weapon in her hand shattered from the force of her blows. When Jimothy was once more on the opposite side of the room from Timothy and Dagmar’s battle, I Blinked, appearing between the battle pair. As soon as I appeared, I cast Shield, blocking a blow that Dagmar had little chance of dodging.

She pulled a spare war pick off my belt as I followed up the block with an overpowered Gust aimed at Timothy’s upper chest as he took a step back to align another strike. The rush of wind in the small room was deafening, but as if in slow motion, we watched as the stone giant was pushed past its tipping point and fell onto its back with a crack that shook the entire Dahn.

By then, Jimothy was upon me again, and I was forced to Wind Jump out of the way and lead him on a chase once more. Dagmar leapt onto the downed golem as it tried to regain its feet, and made three consecutive overhead attacks into the golem’s chest, cackling with glee with each hit like a miner striking gold.

Running from Jimothy had become trivial with my sorcery enhanced movements, and now most of my focus was needed to assist Dagmar in narrowly dodging Timothy’s attacks and getting my own Magic Missiles in when I could. Three strikes after Timothy had regained his footing, Dagmar’s second pick failed to her strength and she scrambled to recover the magical sword she’d discarded at the onset of the fight, but she was too slow. With the fountain between us, I could not assist as Timothy kicked her across the room.

Once Dagmar had died, I spent the remainder of my Will unloading four more Magic Missiles into Timothy before I allowed the pair of golems to catch me. A death spell was out of the question, as we did not know how it would affect the Dahn, and I had no desire to burn to death in the forest outside.

Riloth the 19th the 402nd-407th

The next reset, we brought more weapons. We survived long enough that I needed to drink an additional potion of clarity, and left Timothy looking like he was made from pumice stone, not marble or granite.

After eight days of battle, Dagmar struck the golem in the depths of the cavity we had chiseled into its body, and suddenly its magic gave out, and it collapsed onto the dwarf. So shocked was I at the sudden failure of Timothy, that Jimothy caught me off guard and ended me as well.

Riloth the 19th the 408th-413th

“Torc’s eternal watch, we did it!” Dagmar’s joy filled shout woke me from my sleep.

“How?” I asked groggily.

“We finally got to the soul stone buried in the chest, and that last strike broke it in two, causing the golem to lose its animation.”

We wasted no time going back, not even waking Bearskin this time, so excited were we to finish. Facing a single golem without Timothy’s Spatial Anchor was not even a challenge. I could have done it myself if I’d had an infinite amount of Will. Dagmar would fight Jimothy until she needed a rest, and I would Teleport into her place and lead him on a chase. After six days of battle, the golem crumbled to pieces when struck in the center with one of my Magic Missiles.

The Dahn, which had so far been a place of constant battle and sound, fell into an eerie silence.

“We did it.” I said quietly, without joy or triumph, but awe.

We sat in the rubble of our defeated foes, alongside our magically decaying corpses from the attempts before, resting from the exertion. Dagmar had a very out-of-place grin plastered across her typically somber face.

After a few minutes of silence, I turned to her and said, “Now what?”

We looked around the room, taking it in with new eyes.

The room was a circle, with a fountain in the center and a stalactite of luminescent crystal dominating the center. If the door we’d entered from had been six o’clock, a curved staircase lined the wall from eight to noon. Another door identical to ours stood at three, and between the stairs and the second door the golems had stood in their vigil. All the furniture in this entry hall had slowly been destroyed through our battles, and once destroyed, would disappear the following attempt, carried off by some unseen force.

“Let's go up,” she finally answered.

We approached the stairs, still tired from the battle, but excited to see what lay beyond. We knew a stone door lay at the top of the stairs, but it had refused to open to our earlier attempts. That held true now, and it took the remainder of my Will, and two broken war picks for us to break through.

Beyond lay a semicircular room that took up half the footprint of the building. The ceilings were not as tall as those below, only about eight feet high, but small stained-glass windows lined the walls reminiscent of the large one that dominated the foyer. Two large tables filled the room, with a dozen chairs at each, reminiscent of a mess hall in a military barracks. Beyond those tables sat a door, and behind it lay a kitchen and pantry. The implements of the kitchen looked very similar to those of the dwarven runes in style, but varied greatly in function. No runes or pipes could be found on these surfaces, but metal plates on the stove heated when a pot was placed on it, and the cabinets held food still perfectly preserved, though there was not much left. One cabinet was packed full of lettuce, but the rest were mostly bare, with the occasional mushroom. Then there were the kegs. These were full, and as Dagmar assured me, a very special pre-Flood vintage, made from a mushroom lost to the waters when the Dwarves fled their caves to come to the Basin.

She ran her fingers along the wooden barrels reverently, but stopped herself from trying any with an effort of will.

“Let's go up,” she said.

The next door was not made of stone, but wood, and opened with a push. The floor had a central common area, furnished with couches and chairs sized for gnomes and dwarves, and around this room lay a dozen small rooms with desks and tables. Looking through the rooms, it appeared to be the living quarters of students, which aligned with what Dagmar knew about the Dahn. It had been sent out on a mission to find Primordials, while also tasked with training a new batch of wizards for the Hardune. The loss of this group had been a heavy blow to the magical arsenal of the Hardune, and stifled the last bits of interest the dwarves had in wizardry, leaving the art to the gnomes.

The next floor up was dedicated to practical education, with tables of glassware for alchemy, chisels and carving implements for runesmithing, and a magical forge that produced its own heat like that of the stoves. The alchemy area had a small garden, that was set against one of the stained-glass windows that illuminated the space, these though had long since died from neglect.

The next floor up was a lecture center of some sort. The central room had a sunken pit, around which chairs and desks all looked down upon. At the end of the pit was a magical writing slate that one could draw on with a finger or stylus. Around this central area sat four rooms, larger than those below meant for students—though still sized for dwarves. There was also a small library of texts. They covered topics from history, to alchemy, runecraft, and pre-spellform wizardry.

“Don’t get sidetracked!” Dagmar chastised me as I lingered in the doorway.

“But, books!” I said.

“Yes, but not your book,” she reminded me.

Spellbook!

Somehow, in all of this, I’d forgotten the principal goal for our battle, so focused had I become on the conflict itself.

I activated Willsight, and immediately turned it off. Every surface shone sky blue with an intensity that rivaled Tilavo.

I moved on to attempting to Conjure Spellbook to me, but once again it did not work.

We ran up the stairs to the last floor and found a locked door, though thankfully this one was wood and opened with a bit of applied force. This last floor was a wonder among wonders. It had a similar layout as the rest of the Dahn, with a large central room with smaller rooms along the edges. The central room was a large library, and protruding from the floor in the center sat a massive crystal of the same stone as the light source in the foyer. Floating above it stood an illusionary map of Kaltis. My eyes scanned the shelves, and a quick glimpse with Willsight showed the books to all be mundane. The globe was some sort of visualized scrying spell. The surface of the Basin was rendered in perfect detail, and the closer you looked at a spot, the clearer it resolved. Some areas, like the town of crossroads, were simply blank on the map.

Is this because the spell predates the town, or some sort of anti-scrying effect?

I checked Landing, and Lake Side, and saw that they looked smaller than their current states, but also found similar blank spots in the higher end areas of the cities.

Anti-scrying effects, it seems. Also, this map is very out of date, amazing though it is.

Across the globe stood markings, red, yellow, and green. The green ones were typically small pins sticking out of the surface, while the yellow and red ones ranged from pins to hazy regions. Crossroads sat within one such large, hazy red region.

“Prisons,” Dagmar whispered. “This is a map of the known threats contained by the Hardune. And the suspected locations, I think. Some of these yellow and red zones are where I know the Hardune captured Primordials in the last few hundred years.”

Many of these marked regions lay in the parts of the world covered by water. On the planet opposite from the Basin lay a blue marker. Dagmar pointed to this and said somberly, “This is where the Flood began.”

We moved on to inspect the rest of the top floor. The next room we inspected was a wardrobe, there was also a small private alchemy lab, a large meeting room with additional texts, mostly correspondence and teaching plans, and finally a bedroom. The largest room had an opulent bed that would almost fit a human, but was decadent and indulgent for the gnome that had used it. Next to the bed sat a small bookshelf, and there, sitting atop it, lay you.

Spellbook.