Session 3: The Rising Sea¶

A wall of water taller than any building in Nicodranas was bearing down on the city, and the party had minutes to run. What followed was a desperate flight, a divine visitation, and a miracle no one could explain.

The tsunami came without further warning. The party fled the palace in a scramble of kicked-open doors and shouted directions, Helga scooping up Ada and Alarise and barrelling through corridors while the others sprinted alongside. They made for the Matron’s Temple in the Skew, high on the hills above the harbour, and reached it just ahead of the surge.

At the temple, Alarise sought communion with the Matron of Ravens. The ritual, led by the kindly Reverend Haim Cortho and watched over by the sharp-tongued Sister Thana, appeared to fail. Alarise wept. But then the Matron appeared to her directly -- not through the ritual, but standing in the doorway in astral projection, speaking as plainly as one mortal to another. Something had gone wrong during the ritual of catatheosis, the divine transformation that reshaped the gods. The Matron’s spiritual essence had been separated from her body and was now trapped in the Astral Plane. She asked them to find her old laboratory in the ruins of Avaliir, somewhere among the Shattered Teeth, where there might be materials that could help. The location, she warned, shifts with the strange tides of that place.

Meanwhile, Shin acquired a lead-lined box for a certain dangerous book, and the party tried to catch their breath. Back at the palace, the Marquess was coldly furious that Lucien had been in danger, and made her displeasure with Shin very clear.

Then came the moment the whole city would remember. The tsunami struck an invisible barrier just outside the harbour -- a wall of force that held against hundreds of metres of churning ocean. The water frothed and raged and then, impossibly, drained away. The harbour gently refilled. Nicodranas stood.

No one knew what had saved them. And Lucien, who had collapsed on the road during the flight and woken choking on seawater after a vision of a golden orb floating in endless void, was not sure he wanted to find out.