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Dear Diary, This picture kind of gives things away since it is of Amber after we finished our adventures in Shattered Norns. A close look and you can see that isn't a chain mail tunic made of golden quartz she is wearing, but something better. Anyway ... Just as we thought we were about to sail over the ocean again, and just as Amber got ready to be seasick again, the same fire mage who sent us against the Couranth lord, suggested that if we were to sail into the gate and follow the hidden paths, we could perhaps also locate the gate for the five islands -- one that had survived the dark, but been lost since the return of the sun. Now that seemed easy. The five islands were the last refuge, they are known, these days, for their peace and traditions. I was kind of surprised that the gate was still lost, but they assured us it was not underwater -- the sea lord, one of the leman of the norns, he would have found it if it was. They told us to expect this journey to be quieter, safer and quicker than going over ocean.  We had all had enough excitement (not to mention we were bound to be late back from spring break) and decided that anything that sped things up would be a good thing. Oh, that dragonsnake sort of thing is a picture emblazoned into the stone behind the gate. It made a great picture and was the last thing I was looking at as we sailed into the gate, following the guidance of a starstone that would direct us to the Ostend embassy on the five islands. That way, when we emerged at whatever rockey islet that the gate had ended on, we could find our way back easily. Seemed like a great plan to me. So, we packed up some food, made sure our letters of introduction were easy to find, and entered the gate.  next segment (this link jumps you past some illustrations):

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Did you know that there are things that live in the spaces outside of space?  An acting gate doesn't travel through those areas, from point to point gates contact each other more or less directly. There was an older method of creating gates into the lost spaces and then traveling from one gate to another. I can tell you that the things that live there are why that method of travel has been abandoned. I'm not sure what to say. If you are reading this, you know that this isn't Indigo's writing.  This is Ariel.  I'm finishing this entry up for Indigo. They tell me that she will be ok, and I really hope so. Teal is watching over her himself, but she asked me to finish this entry. I'm not sure she really knew what she was asking for. Kore tells me that Indigo probably has this confused with something else, but that since I promised her, I should do the job. She seemed to rest easier when I promised her I would take care of things. She hasn't been awake since, but Amber and Teal both tell me that is a good sign -- proof that she is healing. The void was strange, kind of like wandering through a sky path, without the path. When we found the boat headed towards a gray spot, I was sure it probably meant trouble. Not that we could be any more alert. We had agreed to set watches, with each of us partnering up so we had at least two on a watch. Amber and I, Jean and Marie, Indigo and her Wolf, Parakile and all the magical creatures he could summon (often with either Marie or Robert-Etienne sitting with him). For the most part it had been pretty boring and quiet, just us in a magic boat sliding like invisible ghosts through an empty void. I could sense trouble when I saw the light patch, and sure enough, there was the trickster, painting. He saw right through the layers of illusion and stealth that hide the boat and waved hello at us. There wasn't anything to do but wave hello back, while using my other hand to signal to everyone to stay still. The trickster looked harmless. Floating out there on an island of land in the midst of the void, painting. But I knew better, especially when he offered to help us find the way and to paint us. A little breath and the wind blew his cap from his head and just as he reached for it, I threw mine to him, wishing him well, and suggesting that he might paint the landscape of the void for the next person to pass this way. As he reached for the cap, the boat swept past and we were gone before he could do more. Only this time I was without a hat at all. We had escaped the painting trap (the one that got the one-eyed king), but it had cost, though not as much as it could have. Then we were into the full void. Which is when we started meeting the things Ariel mentioned. Mostly shadow wraiths of various kinds, Amber recognized a lot of them, though they were all twisted by chaos or hunger. Leaching Blood Wraiths, large reddish-black creatures like rippling black cloaks covered in bloody mouths, Freezing Cold Wraiths, blue-black in color and looking like giant starfish made of ice crystals (almost like giant snowflakes), surrounded by a scattering of blue-black snow casting confusion in their wake, Gray and Black Wind Wraiths, like shadowy columned whirlwinds, scattered tornados of shadowy wind springing out of them (one of those swept Indigo off of the boat, luckily her boots let her avoid being cast into the depths), and a few Dark Lightning Wraiths, arcing like lightning from place to place and blasting their prey with lightning. Not all of those spotted us, we avoided a number, but the void had a lot more wraiths in it than I would have expected. And it wasn't as "voidish" as I would have expected. It was as if the boat was following a path (literally, there was a fairly solid ribbon of shadow that the boat flew over as it followed the load stone. Solid enough to stand on, at least for a while, when we had to stand and fight against a collection of wraiths -- and they were all drawn to the path, as if it pulled them from their rest in the void and sent them hurtling up and down the path once they came to it). We took to taking a slight tack to our following of the load stone, so that we were off the path, one side or the other. The path had a faint light, as shadow is never completely dark, while the void was black as the pit. Which is how we ran into the shadow vampires and the void shark. The void shark we slipped past, Amber and I had seen them before, and the others all watched it silently as it slid by, glowing by its own light, in the dark, preying on elemental shadows (think of them as shadow elementals -- fire/shadow, earth/shadow, water/shadow, air/shadow). But we ran head-on into a nest of shadow vampires in the darkness of the void. They had been hibernating, but our running into them, right through them, woke them all up. Which is what got Indigo into the trouble she is in now. I know, my best friend started life as a shadow vampire. But that isn't what she is now and she wasn't the chaos tainted, life-sucking type.  Her clan lived directly off the raw stuff of shadow -- it is that ability to ingest shadow that allows the shadow inarrii to become vampires. She never took the unholy path and her people rejected it. These were full fledged vampires, hungry and sleeping in the coma that they fall into when deprived of prey for too long, but filled with the energy that leaks into the void here. When the ship hit the sleeping cluster, it was as if we had plowed into hard sand and then over it into water again. Indigo was thrown clear. We were near the path and the ship came to a stop just on the other side of it from the swarming, wide awake cluster and we all took up positions as Indigo scrambled across the sky (so to speak), her boots carrying her even without anything to walk on. She almost made it before they swarmed her, though she did make it to the edge of the path and Robert-Etienne threw himself into the swarm in a fury I hadn't seen.  Amber laid down fire and light and cold sheeted out from me. It was a desperate fight, and the master of the swarm sunk his teeth into Indigo before we slew the last of them. She made it out, but she was pretty cut up, and the last bite marked her. Amber's healing seemed to take care of everything, but the bite mark remained. Which I thought was strange, after all, we may not be the toughest, but the amount of pure anti-chaos magic we have is more than I have ever heard of. But, as Amber noted, the marks were not really chaos, just undead -- and with the master destroyed, they were probably meaningless.  Something we could take care of when we found a better healer than we had.  Amber just smiled at me, since she knows that the Oread that is my family friend has more than two thousand years of experience healing deep wounds and this one just looked cosmetic.   Indigo seemed to just throw it off. I think she wanted some scars to show that she had really been through the conflicts she claimed. So far we have all come through pretty unmarred, which I think is a fine thing, but Indigo isn't as concerned with a good complexion and a pretty face as some of us -- she is kind of like some guys that way -- thinking a good scar is worth more than almost anything else. After that cluster, the way was pretty clear to the gate. The way the path had siphoned off whatever it pulled to it, all of the things moving away from the ends, meant that just as the middle of the journey was more crowded than the void should be, the end was a good deal quieter than we expected. Which was good.  We were able to rest, prepare and get ready before we exited the gate. Not that we expected anything, but it never hurts to be careful. You can say that again. We came out into a wilderness area, with the gate surrounded by standing columns, but no roof.  The columns were burned and scorched, in the center of a maze (that was in the center of wildness). We bypassed the maze by just going up and out and headed for the five families marker we had a load stone for. Which is when we encountered the dragon-snakes.

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The pictures behind what I am writing are from the wall in the Vulture's keep, the Couranth Lord we brought down back in Ostend. But where we were there were live ones. They don't look any better alive and they shed various kinds of magic, each tied to an element. We fought at first, until we realized that there were more coming, not just some random group of creatures in the wilderness (how could there be so many? what would they eat?), then we fled, the boat keeping good speed and Marie scattering the pursuit with her arrows until we lost them all over the open sea. They had no means to penetrate the shielding magic that hid the boat. After that we gained some more altitude, were very careful and found the five islands port that was our goal within a hundred and twenty miles or so (which would have been a hideous journey by boat on the water, fighting snakes all the way). They had some explaining to do, I thought. As we entered the port, we were down to the water level, and we actually sailed in, like a normal boat. We hailed the warcraft guarding the entrance, took on a pilot and took our place at the docks. We presented our letters first to the harbor master and then to the resident delegate of the families. He took us to meet the port council, were we were updated on current issues. This was no where near the simple "fly through an empty void, exit the gate, fly to the port and let the mages take it from there, then take the portal home" experience we had been told to expect. There was a twisted dragon master out there, who had decided to wage war on the five. He had bound a greater old dragon, somehow, though he wasn't controlling it.  But his binding gave him the ability to raise and gather the dragon snakes, and he was breeding them from the stones and fires themselves -- pulling them from elemental forces. His center of power had been shielded from the five, but with the tale of the gate they figured it out -- he had possession of the gate. The gate barrier is ancient, bound in five layers, one for each of the families, intermixed and woven. It absorbs any magic of the five and strengthens its barrier thereby. Great if it is the great dark and you are resisting attempts by Upharsin's forces to come through the gate or assault the islands. A real problem if you are one of the five families trying to use any magic against those inside -- even scrying magic. The islands had been under siege for a while, but had not figured out where it was coming from or why they could not reach it with their magic. Which was as far as we got in the story when snakes burst into the room we were in and all heck broke loose. What a fight, what a mess, broken furniture and windows and dragon parts all over. Time was running.  Whatever kept the great dragon neutralized could not last forever. They needed a counterstrike, and they needed one that could reach inside the magic that was keeping them out.  Which meant us. We had come out from behind the shield, we could go back inside. Our magic was not tied to the families or their wizardry or their heritage. But of course that also meant that we had to do it without any help from the five families. Not even natively crafted arrows (which made Marie grumble just a little, until Wolfie -- Robert Etienne -- told her he had some in the cargo that he had hoped to trade). So we went back to where we had just come out, but of course, this time we were a good deal quieter (nothing like a gate blazing to life to tell the whole world, come see me -- and nothing like a good magical firefight with fire and cold lighting up the sky to draw some attention). That meant Amber and I would rely on our weapons and not our magic. We would take it slowly, on foot (the boat's magic combined with the gate meant that the dragonlord could probably see it -- at least until the gate was reset). Just what I've always wanted, hand to hand fighting with lots of snake-like things. I told you I hate snakes, didn't I?

So, we took it nice and slow, usually with Jean or Robert-Etienne (I just can't call him "wolfie") at point. Parakile was always right behind the point, ready to let the point man fall back and to take whatever it was as it charged to give the rest of us time to react. He also stopped, from time to time, to pull wire from the spines of the dragonsnakes. Not always, not much, but many of them had what looked like crystal wire running down their spines after they were slain. Usually we would hit two or three dragon snakes at a time and the dust-ups were not that loud. Not any louder than the snakes just fighting with each other. The island was becoming a real mess as the elemental effects destroyed the vegetation and cratered the land. But then we hit a few dream snakes and a dream dragon. It was getting tougher -- and that dragonlord was getting more dangerous if he was beginning to pull in and mold dream-stuff. His elemental moldings from having a bound dragon were bad enough, but dream moldings were a step towards a lot more dangerous power. Twice we encountered chaos ridden twisting things, wyrms without legs or claws, in pain from being in the world. These must have been the remnants of his first power, now discarded, but still dangerous. He had tapped into a volcano on this island and had found the gate. He must have found them long ago, and then walked the paths of chaos until he had the power to make more use of the hidden assets. All he needed to was to bind and wake one of the great dragons, and he had done that, though it appeared it was out of his hands (or the thing would have been burning down the islands long before we got there). Still, he was drawing on its shape to summon his creatures from the fire and earth. He had chaos help too. Luckily we ambushed them rather than them ambushing us, but he had lamia running loose on the island, which did not mean good things at all. We needed to get to him quickly if we were going to have any chance. The lamia were breeding, their bites wrapping around the snakes they mastered, and once we put what had been human out of its misery and purged the land of the larvae worming in and out of the poor thing (man, woman, dwarf, fey, roll? I don't know). We finally reached the maze. This time we would have to handle it on foot, and I could see the magic building in the center. A great ritual was beginning and I did not know what it would do or how long we had before it would be too late. Which is when Marie surprised me. Cloaked in mist and shadow she jumped right up on the wall and disappeared. I could hear her voice and from where she was she could see the fastest way through the maze. She led us, better than a map in many ways. The first guardians were statues of liquid rock, magma formed into golems to protect the maze, backed up by four armed flaming shivas. They just absorbed Amber's fire, but my poison, and a little bit of careful cold magic (spikes of it, not great gouting blasts) and the guys wading into them and we were in the maze with no one in shape to flee and give the alarm. Good thing Marie was up on that wall, or one of them would have gotten away, but she jumped down and stopped its flight with an arrow. We just about ran through the maze, avoiding traps (Parakile seemed to sense them) and blowing through the guards and others we met as we ran. Then we came to the center, with the twisted dragonlord face-to-face with us on the other side of the gate, each of the pillars glowing with chaos sygnals. It was a nasty, nasty magic, he was forming a kar manta circle with the gate's magic, binding the entire thing to the kar manta chaos path. He was attended by two guards, several lamia, a Kjttha cluster and two Shalgathii. The guards were rotting bones, bound into armor -- he did not have a single true human with him and all of then reeked of chaos. The guards and lamia rushed us, and as they went down the ritual broke and the rest moved to engage us. The master was in a rage, and suddenly he was a human/snake creature, welts of raw flesh breaking into chaos tainted ruin as the magic took him and made him into what his soul had become, ugly, filthy and with a stench that was as physical as it was of the spirit (and I mean a stench, like a poison, acid cloud, all around him). The Shalgathii spit several of their young at us and then wove magic, the Kjttha cluster broke apart with the outer shell becoming man/leach and slug/leach creatures and the core a man/slug centaur thing with a leach's maw instead of a face. Amber later said that someone must have hit it with an ugly stick. She keeps trying to pick up local slang, but sometimes she gets it right. Since we weren't hiding any more, Amber and I let loose with our fiercest magic, Robert-Etienne blasted them with his mind and there was a great roar from several of the familiars. And then it happened. The twisted one attempted to seize on the marks that still remained on Indigo, to draw her to him and suck down her soul for enough power for whatever it was he was about to do. He succeeded in mastering the mark and drawing her to him, but he should have known better than to draw one of the blue lodge that close as she took what appeared to be his head, then his heart, then broke his spine in five places before the magical anathraxic webs exploded from him.   Not that I saw more than a little of it, I was staff to sword with a lamia queen who had come through my magic a great deal worse for wear and very angry. The poison I've mastered took her and she died in the sort of agony she usually gave others. When the explosions stopped and the roars quieted, there was gore and fire and ice coating everything. Parakile had burst through the last summoning, some dream creature that was attempting to consume and mold the gate into itself. Instead of that, it found only his blade, the bardiche spinning through it in deadly blows. I poured out holy water on the keystone of the gate and the light that sprang forth was almost blinding. The barrier fell and suddenly the mages of the five families were all around us. They had been ready to reclaim that gate for five hundred years. Then there was a great roar and we could see an elder dragon against the sky. It fell to earth, shrinking somewhat as they do when they don't intend any harm, and Kore dismounted off of its back. Then the dragon shook itself and scales fell like rain. Kore smiled (she later explained that the binding magic applied to the name of the dragon as it carried it in the dragon's scales. She had kept the twisted chaos from controlling the drake, just by being close to it with her sword, but once the magic was broken, the dragon discarded everything that had to do with the curse, including the name and the scales. So, she could give us the old name -- which meant we could work the scales -- which is how Amber got that spiffy armor she now wears). That was when I saw that Indigo had fallen. Wolfie was already holding her. Slaying the holder of the marks had had an effect of her, especially as she had done it. She was alive, her magic was strong, but the forces holding her to life were pretty evenly balanced. Which is how she got into the situation she is now, Teal watching her with his healing aura holding her to life and us watching Teal and an old Oread coming to visit as fast as she can. Guess I should finish the story. Yes, we got some silk thread (and they even wove it for us, though we have other silk to take to the weavers), but we also got dragon scales, the name to work them, powerful transformation magic in the cleansed pillars (we had access to that magic, having cleansed the pillars, though I'm not sure what I will ever do with the magic, should I chose to use it) and Parakile had a collection of snake wire. Jean and Marie finished their migrations and transformations. They've become fully some sort of elf. When we got home, Indigo's secret service agent was there and she immediately called her boss who took over. My griffin immediately flew to the mountain top with a message for the Oread, and flew back to say she was coming, though through the deep ways in the earth, not on the back of a snow griffin. Parakile gave the snake wire to Tinda and mentioned that his people would gladly inlay it into Tinda's armor for him (hmm, has Indigo written how cute Tindalasse is anywhere?  That is something that deserves mention.  Oh my. If only had more time.)  We were in real trouble with the schools, having missed finals (we took a little too long on our spring break vacation), but Tindalasse's father came through for us, telling the authorities that we had been called away and would they please make arrangements for us?  Which meant summer school for a couple months and then a couple months vacation. Amber and I already have a plan for that time. At least we have a plan if Indigo comes out of that coma. Otherwise I'm going to just sit here and write and pray. Guess I've finished writing, so I'll just be praying.

Copyright 2001-2003 Stephen R. Marsh and Heather N. Marsh E-Mail comments and suggestions to: story (at) adrr (dot) com We would love to know how you got here and what you think about the site All Rights Reserved Terms of Use / Story Index

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