Dear Spellbook,

I stumbled on a very unexpected bit of information today, but I need to catch you up on a few things, lest I get ahead of myself.

Riloth 19th the 1554-1564th

It took twelve days for the cultists to realize it was a bad idea to keep killing themselves. After that, we moved on to creating another teleportation circle. This one was linked to Abby’s cave. Unlike the portal to Fauell, the outsider didn’t have a large impact on the spatial properties of the region. It only took the runic duo six days and two sessions of fiddling about with runes with the doorway open to get the circle up and running. Daulf moved the old circle to the side of the small “living room” we’d added off of the kitchen when we’d lost the foyer to serve as the prison for the cultists, and the new one took its place beside it. Each circle of runes was about eight feet across and riddled with runes so dense it simply looked like rough stone at first glance.

Levar thinks this method of creating teleportation circles won’t be as useful if we should ever escape the resets. Without a manufactured circle on the other end, the properties of the target region would shift over time to the point where the circle and region had no connection. Testing Greater Teleport at different times of the day suggested this to be the case. Their circle was tied to the target regions near noon time, and as the day grew closer to noon, the connection felt stronger. Just before the resets, the area I could teleport to using the circles was greatly reduced and difficult to connect to.

In the end, the emergence of the demons ended up being a bit of a blessing. It forced us to learn to create teleportation circles, which will be key in saving the village in the kobolds path, along with any other people in danger at the start of each reset.

Unfortunately, we cannot simply fill the Dahn up with all of our enemies and solve the problems that way, so this will be key. Daulf found that people that enter the Dahn without some sort of connection cause a drain on its power. To fit all the cultists within, we had to reduce the place to smaller than its original size from when I’d discovered it. The whole of the foyer was turned into a cell for the cultists, and we all squeezed in up above. I was forced to condense all the books of the library and pile them up in a corner to use the space for our own quarters.

The stronger the individual, the greater the drain as well. The cultist leader we captured early on was the hardest for Daulf to accept, but each grew easier after that.

Riloth 19th the 1565th

I teleported to Abby’s cave a minute after the reset the today after we’d gotten it properly aligned. Kobold’s lay scattered about the dark cave, visible only in my Willsight. They didn’t stir at my arrival, but I felt Abby’s probing at the edges of my thoughts. I threw a handful of the paper-freezing cubes into each of the pools and activated them all after a brief pause. The mental assault picked up as the outside began to panic in the suddenly freezing pool of water, and around me, the kobolds woke from their sleep, likely alerted by the monster. They quickly spotted me, but before they could muster any sort of offensive, I cast a third-tier Vortex, sending any nearby flying, and followed that up with a series of Magic Missiles, each taking out one of their sorcerous leaders. One managed to complete their own spell before I slew them, but I didn’t even bother to Counter it, instead blocking the Lightning Bolt with a Shield, and following it up with another Magic Missile barrage. With their mages dead, and lacking any means to push through my Vortex, the surviving kobolds fled.

I made why way up the ladder and through the trapped hallways before I encountered any more kobolds. These were awake, but in the narrow confines of the fortress, Lightning Bolt made short work of the diminutive creatures. All together, it took about ten minutes from the start of the reset till I was sitting in an empty dwarven outpost waiting for something to happen.

“Hello?” I yelled into the empty hall. “Any duergar? Kim?”

I guess the golems haven’t arrived yet. That's promising. Are the people below there? Could we ambush them and forstall the resets entirely?

With the aid of Wind Run, I fled through the tunnels towards the collapsed section where Trish had fallen down the pitfall. I sent magical darts into the floor causing it to collapse, and jumped down after the falling stone. Using the still active Wind Run, I kept myself from crashing into the walls, and near the end of the descent directed it downward to arrest my fall.

As soon as my feet touched the ground, a giant hand grabbed me by the neck and slammed me into the ground before releasing me. I tried to push myself up, but found every inch of myself stuck to the ground in a familiar manner.

I guess they are here. Maybe...

“Wait!” I shouted, My voice distorted, being unable to fully move my jaw with how it was fastened. “Bishop Darwi sent me! The Hardune are coming!”

The pale humanoid, the flaming dwarf, the shadow else, and Maeva all stood around watching me, prepared to slay me.

“He's lying,” the pale humanoid said, in a very familiar accent before she attacked my mind.

As soon as she breached my mind, I lost my concentration on the collar around my neck, and it activated prematurely ending the reset for me.

Riloth 19th the 1566-1567th

I Teleported back to the Dahn as soon as I woke and shouted, “The pale one talks like my father!”

“What in Torc’s rocky nethers does that mean?” Dagmar asked, surly as ever.

Trish and Dagmar sat playing a dwarven game of chance in one corner of our new living space.

The taller of my two female friends perked up at my announcement.

“You got them to speak? What do you mean?”

“She had the same accent as my father! I don’t know what that means, but it does suggest my father was wrapped up in all of this.”

I’d never told Trish about my father’s odd accent, and when I described it two her, she went through a dizzying series of accents, asking after each if I recognized it.

After about forty, she said, “Well, that is basically all the Rilith accents of the Basin.”

She then began to go through the few pre-Flood accents that still survived in pockets on the floating cities.

“Some of those sound close,” I said, “But none match.”

“Well I guess I’ll have to just hear it first hand,” she volunteered with a heavy sigh. “I flooding hate dying.

* * *

The next reset, I teleported, slew Abby, and then teleported Trish to me. Trish had little defense against the outsider, and we didn’t want to risk losing more time while we waited for her to break free of her compulsion. With my experience from before and Trish’s aid, we cleared the kobolds out in under ten minutes, and once more I accompanied Trish down a pitfall to the depths below. This time, however, Trish vanished into thin air as we neared the bottom, and I slowed myself with my Wind magic. Just as before, Maeva pinned me to the ground, and I repeated my lie.

“Wait! Bishop Darwi sent me! The Hardune are coming!”

“He's lying,” the pale humanoid said again before attacking my mind.

This time I intentionally maintained my focus on the collar and defended from the attack to buy Trish more time witnessing this creature’s speech.

“Where are you from?” I spat between clenched teeth as I focused on blocking her out.

“Worry more about where you are going,” she said, struggling as much as I was in our mental dual. “You wiil...”

Her voice trailed off as she looked to the side and he assault ended just as it had begun.

“Kill him,” she yelled, “There’s another!”

Trish materialized out of thin air, clutching her head as she writhed in pain. The shadow elf stepped toward me to obey, but I cast a fourth tier Vortex, blowing everyone back in a sudden explosion of wind. My spell broke the pale one’s attack momentarily and the magic of Trish’s sword protected her from the wind. She used the opportunity to draw her sword as a dagger and plunge it into her own heart. Once I was sure she’d died, I let my concentration lapse on my collar.

Riloth 19th the 1568th

Trish woke me early the next reset and told me to meet her in the dining room once I’d gotten my head right.

I found her leaning back in her chair, balancing it on its back legs while propping her feet up on another chair when I arrived. Before he sat two cups of coffee and a plate piled high with bacon. Ever since the Dahn shrunk, she did weird things like this to “take advantage of all the space” when outside of it.

“The Dahn isn’t that small,” I told her as I threw her a clarity potion.

She caught it, holding her hand up a few feet to the right of its trajectory and then redirected it to her palm with her the sword of Egan’s power.

“You keep telling yourself that,” she said with a wink.

“Alright, let's not start this. Did you recognize the accent?

“Illandrios,” said, her face growing serious out of respect for the topic. “The accent is from there.”

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“Are you supposed to be the smart one?” she said, unable to resist the jab.

“Just tell me,” I said, not in the mood.

“Sorry. It's a magical city from before the Flood. I only know the accent because there was a play that survived the flood, and my mother’s acting company used period-appropriate accents whenever they could. Many of the original settling elves still live, so it's not too hard to find people who know the accents. They performed a play about the Sealing of Illandrios. As the waters rose, the mages of the city erected a great dome to protect them. The few elves of the city fled, preferring a life at sea to one trapped under it, and some of those survivor’s tales were turned into a play.”

“Is it okay?” I asked

“The play? It's fine I guess, it's a tragic romance about a human and elf that—” she stopped speaking as she noticed my glare. I didn’t have the patience for her antics when it came to this topic.

“Sorry,” she said, holding her hands up. “Sometimes I can’t help it. I don’t know if it's okay. The elves that fled didn’t do so because they thought the plan was doomed. They simply didn’t want to live trapped in a bubble.”

“Does the play say anything that could explain that weird pale mage?” I asked

“No, that's pretty weird—and gross. But on the topic of her, I don’t think she’s a mage—or rather, Uncle says she’s not. He got a good look at her yesterday and said some of her magic is not drawing on the Fonts at all.”

“She’s an outsider?”

“No, she’s definitely from our Realm—according to Uncle—she’s just using power from elsewhere. It’s more likely that she's a warlock pacted to some being from beyond our Realm.”

“Hmmm,” I said, considering her words. “That fits with what I felt from her mental magic. It felt much more akin to Abby’s then... the other guys.”

We both looked around the hall anxiously even though we knew Tilavo wouldn’t return to the Parlor for an hour still.

“If she is from this Illandrios, and that is my father’s homeland, that could explain why he left and why he felt he needed a dragon’s aid to return. I’d like to try to interrogate that warlock if we get the chance. Where was this Illandrios place?”

“I’m not actually sure,” Trish said. “I never looked into it. That seems like something more in line with your skill set than mine.”

I agreed, and told Trish to meet me in the library in a few hours to teleport back to the Dahn.

I spent that time searching the Parlor’s library for any sign of the city of Illandrios and found absolutely nothing. There were plenty of maps and records of ancient pre-Flood cities, but not a single mention of Illandrios.

Well this is strange.

I enlisted Jarret’s aid, and the man had never heard of the place and turned up nothing in his own search. A message to Levar via your pages assured me he knew not of such a place and nothing in his shop had mentioned it either.

“Too bad I can’t ask the dragon without him trying to kill me,” I muttered to myself.

“Dragon?” Jarret asked, looking up from his cart as he moved to put all the books back which we’d scoured.

“Ummmm,” I said as I stood up and headed towards the door. “Don’t worry about it. I got to go. Bye.”

I found Trish on her way to meet me.

“We should probably go,” I said, grabbing her wrist for a Greater Teleport. “I used the D word with Jarret, and I don’t wan’t want to wait around.”

* * *

In the Dahn, Levar and I set to work reading through the less magically inclined books. There was a small section on “Waatin history” that we’d both been meaning to get to eventually, but the wealth of arcane and runic secrets in the Dahn had been more than enough to fully occupy our time. It only took an afternoon of searching before we found mention of it.

“I found it!” Levar said, jumping up from his seat.

I ran over and leaned in, reading over his shoulder. The book was a sort of encyclopedia of the military capabilities of the surface forces in the territory of the dwarves.

Surface Forces of Note

Illandrios is the multi-racial home to elves, humans, and halflings, not affiliated with the Midlian empire. A small transient population of gnomes and dwarves are present, but the arcane focus of the town does not attract Torc’s children in great numbers. The city sits at the base of a small mountain and is a place of magical learning, and the vast majority of its citizens have some small level of arcane proficiency. The cities military might is built around this ubiquitous magical proficiency. The powerful mages make up the backbone of the military, and the rank and file soldiers are trained around protecting these individuals. Squadrons and battalions are built around the affinities of the rank and file. Each square is created to have a diverse mix of Font affinities to provide protection, offensive power, and utility, though due to the nature of affinities there is no standard make up. While not allied formally with any nation of Torc’s people or the Hardune, the city is a staunch enemy of the forsaken. A large population of dark elves reside in the Tor below the city, and there is a constant war between the elves and the Waatin of the city. The city is a potential ally if aid can be lent to deal with their forsaken threat.

Along with the entry came a map. A vaguely familiar map.

Heedless of the risk, I teleported back to just outside Crossroads, ran into the walls, and then teleported into my room where I riffled through my satchel in search of my father’s notes.

What had seemed like a random assortment of pre-Flood minutiae took on a whole new meaning in light of my current theory. Shipping records of magical reagents, lists of wars that involved powerful non-Midlian mages, maps of seemingly random areas of the world.

One such map, showed a region from some small kingdom pre-Flood I’d never heard of and showed the locations of three small villages. Kandos, Ipsan, and Dalimar. Three villages that were also listed on the map Levar had just discovered, only his map had a fourth city set right in the center.

Illandrios.

My father’s map showed a small and lonely mountain in the location the dwarven mapped claimed the city to be.

I teleported directly back to Levar and dumped my father’s papers over the table.

“This is what he was looking for!” I shouted, celebrating with the only other person I knew who’d be as excited as my father to find a singular word on a page.

Levar pored over the documents, and I sat watching, unable to believe that this was happening. I’d never really put a lot of thought into the topics of my father’s personal study in life. Much like his sword and our own peculiar lack of a surname, it was something my mind bounced off of when it wandered to it. But this was it. We’d found it. My father was from some magical city lost to the waves, and he was searching for a way back. And possibly, a way to save it from some outsider force.

With the aid of the illusory globe, Levar quickly identified the location of Illandrios, roughly a hundred leagues off the east coast of Basin, buried beneath the sea.

We shared the news with the group, and I was surprised at the happyness I saw on each of their faces. I’d not expected them to care at all for the largely academic discovery, but she seemed nearly as happy as I.

“Of course we care, you idiot,” Dagmar said when I asked. “It's your family.”

Daulf nodded, and added, “If you choose to seek this place out, I will travel with you once the immediate threats of the forsaken and cult are dealt with.”

“And after we find my son,” Dagmar added.

“Yes,” Bearskin said. “I will go too.”

I looked at Trish, and she let out a sigh.

“Obviously I am going to help. But I’m still going to complain about it and make you pay me back in some way.”

Roland sat in the corner silently, he’d been even less talkative than normal since he’d lost his memories.

When Trish shot him a furtive glance, he noticed and said awkwardly, “We’ll see.”