'When his story spread, others started coming here, hoping to share in Madmen's good luck.'
'How many who enter the Plague-wrought Land return?'
'Well, at first the survival rate wasn't too good. We're a few years in now, though. Pilgrims got a chance to get in and get out without dissolving into slime or blowing away in a puff of wind.'
'And how many come back spellscarred?' pressed the monk.
'One out of every ten who survive in the first place,' pronounced the grandfather as solemnly as if he were relaying news of a new king in Cormyr.
'And how many survive?' prompted Raidon.
'Not always the same. Sometimes it's one out of five, other times one out o' twenty.'
Nearby patrons blanched.
'So Kiril Duskmourn entered the Plague-wrought Land,' said Raidon, 'and never returned.' He uttered the last as a statement, not a question.
The old man nodded. 'Yes. She was with a dwarf; his name I don't recall. He said he was a geomancer who wanted to study the Plague-wrought Land from the inside.'
'His name was Thormud. But a geomancer? What's that?'
The old man shrugged. 'Who knows? He said he was seeking something. A… a 'chalk horse,' I think. The dwarf and Kiril went in, and…' The old man shrugged again, then called loudly for another drink.
The barkeep complied. As she passed Raidon with another sloshing tankard, she said, 'I sell safe routes into the Plague-wrought Land. How much you willing to pay?'
Raidon examined the map penned on rough parchment. A trail called the 'Pilgrim's Path' was crudely marked. It snaked past Onnpetarr's gates and on into the hazy edge of the Plague-wrought Land. The path meandered relatively straight for a few miles until it rounded a landmark labeled 'Granite Vortex.' The route zigged and zagged between several more unlikely sounding locations, slowly wending toward the heart of the discontinuity. The last portions of the map contained several alternate routes, all marked with a symbol indicating ignorance of what lay beyond it.
The barkeep had assured the monk that if he stayed on the path, there was a better than even chance he'd survive. At least until he got closer to the center, at which point it was anyone's guess. But only those who pressed forward at the last were rewarded with a spellscar. Well, the handful who were not caught up and consumed. It seemed a mad gamble to Raidon. He hoped his own previous contact with the spellplague would offer him some protection now.
The pack burro to Raidon's left issued a complaining bleat. A gray-haired woman was hanging another waterskin to its already prodigious load. The woman's name was Finara, and she was a mage, or had been, before the Spellplague. She'd lost her way since then. She had not been able to learn the new weft of the Weave, and thus could no longer perform magic. Upon losing her spellcasting ability, followed soon by her wizard tower and livelihood, hard times found her. Finara explained she was a pilgrim now because it was the only option remaining. If she couldn't find a new understanding of magic in the Plague-wrought Land, she was happy to accept death in its stead.
To the monk's right stood a young man in simple leathers. An old long sword in a battered sheath hung on his belt. The man said his name was Hadyn. He'd traveled far to become a pilgrim. All the way from Waterdeep, he had earnestly explained. Even after the rest of his party had fell to gnoll marauders in the Greenfields, Hadyn had pressed onward. He said his journey took him the better part of a year. He said a dream sustained him. A dream of wielding a piece of the Weave, like a god of old.
When Raidon bought the map from the barkeep, she'd explained that a small party of pilgrims was readying for a trip into the Plague-wrought Land the very next morning and that he was welcome to join them. The barkeep explained groups had a better success rate for bare survival than lone explorers. Raidon thanked her and agreed to join the foolhardy band.
'Are you ready?' inquired the monk of his chance-met companions.
Hadyn smiled and gave a firm nod.
Finara looked worried but said, 'Of course.'
Behind them stood a small crowd, mostly would-be pilgrims who had yet to gather the courage for their own try at a spellscar. When Raidon, Hadyn, Finara, and the burro started forward, they loosed a ragged cheer.
Before them was the steep precipice that divided the surviving half of Ormpetarr from the cloud of churning color that consumed the southern portion of the city. An enterprising carpenter had rigged a wooden ramp down the least steep portion of the slope, held in place by rope and iron pitons. The ramp descended into the mist. The rickety platform marked the beginning of the Pilgrim's Path.
They descended the wooden ramp, its boards creaking with each step. The burro complained loudly, but Finara managed to yank it along.
They paused at the interface's edge. From a distance, it looked like bluish fog. This close, it was more like gazing down into a rippled, partly murky pool. Everything outside was sharp-edged and clear, and everything within was blurred and wavering. Shapes and colors writhed beyond the boundary, but from this side, it was impossible to determine what they were.
Raidon concentrated on the Cerulean Sign blazoned on his chest. Despite his fears, it was quiescent. It detected nothing blatantly aberrant in the Plague-wrought Land, at least here.
Taking a deep breath, Raidon plunged through.
A cold, tingling wave prickled across his skin, tugged at his clothes, and pulled his hair out straight. Hues he'd never seen or imagined danced across his vision. He blinked, trying to clear his eyes, and finally succeeded. Before him lay the Plague-wrought Land.
A warped, quivering vista spread away south. Land slid and mixed like slowly boiling mud. Not only land, but rivulets of blue fire, ruins, trees and foliage, and even the sky itself dipped down here and there to touch the ground. It all flowed together as if contained in a cream churner whose edges were the horizon. The earth, streamers of blue fire, air, and half-glimpsed items of incomprehensible aspect mixed, melded, then separated, emerging from the morass as some new, more bizarre feature of the landscape.
To the ramp's left, an object, half stone, part color, and perhaps partly living-slowly heaved up out of the undulating earth below. It was the size of a city building, and it blazed like an azure bonfire. It groaned and shrieked, reached a hand-like appendage for the pilgrims. It dissolved into a cacophony of screams, gleams, and flowing liquid before it could reach them.
'Gods!' Hadyn burst out. He backpedaled but was blocked by the burro.
Finara grabbed Hadyn's shoulder and yelled loud enough to be heard above the roar of the subsiding object, 'Wait! Stay with us!'
The young man struggled in her grasp. Finara spun Hadyn around and said, 'We knew we'd find something like this! We knew the spellplague still cavorted here! We can't turn back now!'
Finara's eyes sought Raidon's. Despite her words, her tone and glance seemed to be asking Raidon: or can we turn back after all?
Raidon studied the wooden bridge, which stretched forward across and through the tumult. Somehow, the wooden construction remained inviolate. At least as far as he could see, though a bend in the path took it behind a glimmering indigo mound and out of sight.
The monk said, 'I intend to press onward.'
Finara let go of the young man. He released a shuddering breath, then he said, 'Sorry about that. I–I was caught off guard. I want to keep going too. I want a spellscar.'
They started again. Raidon tried to keep his eyes on the wooden planks before him, but flashes of light, roars of outrageous sound, and sudden winds kept flicking his attention up to one side or the other. Each time he did so, his focus trembled.
A hundred paces farther on, Hadyn stopped, bent over the side of the wooden bridge's railing, and was noisily sick.
They waited, saying nothing, eyes averted. Raidon suspected the wavering perspective was confusing the young man's senses as much as it tried to disrupt his own. Raidon's martial focus provided protection, and by the smell of Finara's breath, spirits apparently provided her some insulation from the mad panorama. The young man had to rely on willpower alone to keep shuffling forward.
