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.... So, we thought we were about to take a vacation ....

The ambassador invited us to the shadow mountains, to spend a little time in his vacation home.

Just a short visit to his home, and then ...

So, we traveled down.  We met with him at the outer foreigners plaza.  It is a great public square of sorts, part-way caravan stop, part-way outdoor market, part-way foreign sector.  It is between the lesser walls that encompass the slums and other things that spring up around a city and the great walls, that mark the true city.  Inside the great walls is the inner foreign plaza, where the ambassadors live and where he was afraid we would get in trouble.

His plan was to show off his contacts, by meeting us there, and then to settle any debt anyone might feel he owed us by giving us the use of his vacation villa in the mountains of shadow -- which are half in Startstrands and half in the shadow realms.  Beautiful, but weird.

Well.

It couldn't be that easy.  Our meeting was interrupted by an ambassador known merely as "The Witch" or "The Witch with a Thousand Faces."  She was from another of the powers aligned with the Kar Manta's master.  Her minion went for Thalia/Indigo and she went after my brother in her form as the Chaos Vortex (imagine a great tornado of chaos).

Bad mistake.  He (Robert) struck with the dragon powers (all the better my Dad had given him an ancient dragon's talon as an adult name day gift for his birthday right before this latest set of adventures), blasting the chaos and called lightning with his spear.  She was bloody giblets of decaying slime -- beyond restoration.  Her secret power of return was tied to chaos and she met the only death she could meet that was final.

Her minion had festering appendages.  It was an enfolder.  Thalia just laughed at it and cut the tentacles and appendages off as fast as they sprouted.  Where her curved blade cut, nothing grew back.  With the power of the Curse of Ceres, she withered any power of growth or healing it had.  Then she enfolded it in her chain and struck true.  With its mistress dead, there was none to heal or revive it, and it too passed beyond life, slain in both the realm of life and that of dream, a final death much as she had met.

Well.  That wasn't exactly what the ambassador had planned, though he wasn't responsible for it (at least not in a strict sense).  But he was anxious to get us out of town.  So away we went, into the  foothills before the mountains.

Where we discovered the next problem.  The Witch had a demon army hidden in the shadow valleys.  She had planned to attack the city.  Now they were about to attack us.  We fled into the mountains, one step ahead of them.

The good thing was that the city became aware of it, and the ambassador realized that we had saved the city, and triggered the unveiling of the army.  I guess we could have also attempted to take the army.  Sure.

That wasn't our job and it wasn't safe for us to remain in the world.  Luckily there was a gate my brother knew of from the mountains of shadow to the mountain shrines of a realm my brother knew, a place called Shattered Norns.  From there he could guide us home. Or so he thought.


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