fire down below

We completed the trip back to Seawell where things still looked tense. People could see there was some water in the river but it would still be quite a while before there was enough for them to drink and water their crops.

There wasn’t much reason to stick around here so we slept the night to recuperate and then headed off to the lighthouse to talk with Mervil. It took us a day or two to get there and when we did Mervil wouldn’t open the door. We slipped Miranda’s letter under the door and he told us to return the next day. I decided to set camp and wait but the othershad some obsession with the centipede cave and set off to clean it out.

It was late that night by the time the returned, which was somewhat surprising—I didn’t really expect them to have much trouble burning out the nest, and with the lack of water I wasn’t sure that the nest would still be there anyway.

However it didn’t look like centipede bites all over them. Kat looked okay, but most of the others seemed to have nasty burns. It turned out that they had made their way through the centipede caves to the chasm with only a minor skirmish with some chokers. However they could see another cave on the other side that contained a large shallow water pool and they’d been hit by some sort of elemental which had almost killed Glyn and Valkor.

They were out for vengeance and I figured it might provide some more clues about the problem we were really trying to solve so I went with them. Whatever it was they’d fought was gone though and we spent hours finding nothing but more flooded underground caverns. The spells we’d cast were long gone and they actually showed some sense and gave up the pursuit and we returned to the lighthouse.

Mervil actually let us in this time and we spoke to him about the problems that were occurring. He had some interesting information, such that the island’s water source emits from a portal which seems somewhat too convenient to be accidental. The suggestion is that many hundreds of years ago someone modified the islands to make them more habitable.

Are the problems we face now just the expected deterioration of the magical tampering done so long ago?

He was interested to hear about the ruins on Bellatune but even more interested to hear about Red the humbug. He wants to go and consult with everyone’s favourite guru, and will be able to transport us to the island magically.

What magic does this Red person exude that everybody thinks he knows something??? I’m not sure I can stand another pointless trip to Red’s mountain and between that and the obsession with wanton destruction I think perhaps it’s time I went my own way to find out what’s going on.