Chapter Text
You awake to pine needles, moss, and several broken ribs. Gasping in agony only makes things worse, and it seems an eternity of ragged breathing before your blind fumbling manages to locate a healing potion and get it to your mouth.
Not for the first time, you reflect that wizards are not made for the rough-and-tumble life… but one must tough to survive as a wizard, and an uncommon tolerance for pain is no small part of what earned you a place among the greatest of the present age. Broken bones are momentary; an elven archmage's accomplishments stand eternal.
Sitting up and glancing around, you find you're in a forest, ancient and grey and dripping with lichens, lying at the edge of a perfectly-circular clearing that still smoked from whatever produced it. Around the circle are several other members of your expedition. You quickly identify your sister Anya, and see that she's also more or less intact, although her arm is in a position that suggests a need for healing.
What in the hells just happened?
You wrack your brain to try and put together the last moments before consciousness failed you. You recall well the runes on the ritual chamber floor scrawled in blood and still-steaming entrails, bright with unholy radiance, the singing of the remaining devout as they called to their True Master awaiting in the realms beyond, the sheer power that had been enough to make your head spin. You and your party members traded spells and shot with the Nightrunner leaders as they desperately fought to finish their work. Blood and screams and gunsmoke filled the room. Then the ground started to shake as the ceiling fell in great stone chunks, the air became thick and hard to breathe, and then you were falling and everything was dark.
That was… you hadn't taken the time to try and decipher whatever it was the Nightrunners were trying to accomplish, the urgency of the moment had not permitted that, but it looked very much like a ritual of calling. They had been attempting to draw on powers from the outer planes, possibly a devil or demon lord or even worse. Wayward souls attempted such things all the time and typically succeeded in nothing more than summoning their insides to their outsides, or conjuring some fiendish frogspawn that promptly devoured them before buggering back off to the lower planes. Such matters are beneath the attention of a seventh-order archmage. At first you hadn't believed Anya's insistence that these ones were any different. But this lot had serious power, and the knowledge to act on it.
Whatever their aim, they did ultimately manage *something,* as evidenced by your now no longer being in the ritual chamber.
Well, time to get moving. You hop up, Prestidigitate off a cloud of dust and dirt, and get your hair back in its neat braids, then hold out your arm and call for Shadow, your familiar. A moment later the oversized raven winks into being on your forearm and gives you a whisper-thin croak. You flick your eyes upward, and without further instruction he flaps into the air. Leaving him to it, you find your way to your sister, and after considering the kindest method of waking her, pour a healing potion on her face.
"Wha…?" she mutters. "What the- OW, FUCK!"
Her arm makes a rather unpleasant noise as the bones knit themselves back together.
"Morning," you say nonchalantly.
"For fuck's sake, Alyssa, you could have warned me," Anya replies, cradling her newly-mended arm.
"It would only have prolonged your suffering."
She gives you a familiar evil look, but quickly softens. "What's this about morning? Wasn't it midnight a moment ago? And- wait, where is this?"
"I have no idea." You close your eyes and take a look through Shadow's. "There's forest all around, but there could be farms to the east. Not seeing much else."
"Damn. East it is, then," Anya says as she pulls herself up. Once upon a time your mirror image, your twin now keeps her dark hair much shorter and out of her eyes in a haphazard pony-tail, lacking any hint of the highborn refinement to which you were raised, in sharp contrast to your ever-elegant braids. So too her speech, as plain and coarse as a mortal sailor's, and her dress, a simple tunic with the sun-disk of the Dawnfather over mithril half-plate. "Who else came through?" she says, examining the clearing.
You look with her and see five other figures. The whole party is here, it seems. A rather exceptional gathering of talent in this day and age: an archmage, archpriest, and archdruid all of the seventh order, along with four others of commensurate ability. But the Nightrunners proved dangerous enough to warrant it.
Anya mutters a spell under her breath, and with a wave of her hand the faint light of a Mass Cure Moderate Wounds washes over everyone present, setting them to rouse in the process. Further relief seeps into you as aching muscles mend, and you feel almost back to normal.
First awake is Soren. At just over seven feet, he's none too tall for a goliath, although plenty broad, and has rather more hair on his head than most. He's a paladin and a colleague of Anya's among the faithful of Pelor. You've worked with him twice before, and felt him to be a solid reliable sort.
Less certain is Senna, his young protégé. As to what sort of life that girl must have experienced to make her a world-class combatant by the time she came of age, you can only speculate, but it's left her distinctly skittish. Such is all too often a Changeling's lot. A shame, really - she has some latent talent at spells and in another life might have had a chance at being a real wizard. When she wakes, it's all at once, and she bursts off the ground as disappears so swiftly one might mistake her for having become invisible.
The other two of Anya's hires are human men, musketeers you know only vaguely by reputation. So far they're pulling their weight. Emíl the Bard is a skilled enchanter and illusionist as well as sharpshooter, while Lukas is so taciturn you know only that he is good with figures and has a keen interest in artifice.
While Anya moves to confer with her colleagues, you leave her to it, instead turning your attention elsewhere to your party's druid, with whom you have worked with many times before.
Stretching out where she lays languid as a cat is Eva. Barefoot, red-haired, and dressed in the plainest brown tunic, the diminutive little wood-elf is the autumn forest come to life.
"I'm guessin' we won?" Eva says, "Seein' as we're all alive." A flicker of doubt crossed her face "We *are* alive, right?"
"I've been to the Hells before, and this isn't there," you reply, offering her a hand up, which she accepts. At her full height she doesn't quite reach your collarbone. "I don't think this the Seven Heavens either, nor the Fey-wilds or any of the primordial planes. As to victory? I haven't the faintest idea."
"We did 'em a real number though!" she says cheerily. "Just like those vampires in Corinthia. I bet they won't be tryin' whatever that was again for a good long time!"
"If only we should be so lucky."
"Alyssa!" you hear your sister calling your name, and you turn your attention to her again. "It's not working," she says, holding up a small object you recognise as a sending stone. "I can't reach anyone."
It's confirmed, then. A recipient might simply refuse to hear a Sending as from a spell, but a joined stone could fail only if obstructed by special-purpose wards or if a stone were to be in different planes of existence from the others.
"I don't suppose either of you thought to prepare a Plane Shift yesterday?" you ask.
Both Anya and Eva shake their heads.
Even had they though, there's a good chance it wouldn't have helped. Interplanar navigation is rather more perilous and imprecise than teleportation across a single plane even at the best of times; attempting to plane shift on the fly without even knowing where one is in the first place is just asking for trouble. And that was before considering the possibility of travel restrictions imposed by local - or Higher - authorities.
You pause to consider your next step. You have one Greater Teleportation available, and you can see what looks like a settlement to the east through your familiar's eyes. But you also have a Galder's Tower prepared, in case you want to shelter here instead.
1) Shelter in place until the morning, wait to prepare your spells and rest up a bit from your recent battle.
2) Go to town now. If you're lucky, you may be able to procure some help, and if not you'll likely still have some strong city wards to shelter behind instead of a flimsy conjured shack in a forest which could be inhabited by gods-know-what.