Riders on the Storm

Adventure Journals

I remember thinking what a wonderful rope this was, and why was it hanging in such a strange place. I should make it clear that it was not the place itself that was strange, but just a strange place for a rope to be hanging. I found myself in some sort of cavern. It was very cold and I could not remember how I got here. All that I could recall began on a large boat.

Perhaps I was studying my magics and created such a detailed illusion that I even fooled myself into thinking I had come to this distant place. There are stories of practitioners of my art creating such elaborate environments that included even the finest of details with illusory beings that would seem so real you would swear they were. In one case a great Illusionist created a small village and populated it with his imagination. It is said when the spell wore off, after some number of years, the spell caster himself disappeared just as if he were one of his own creations. It has been secretly theorized that the village he created was actually real and that the rest of the world was his imaginings.

This would undoubtedly not go over well with the general populace so I will not repeat it.

But could it be that my journeys throughout Barsaive have all just been my twisted imagination and the spell I cast to bring it to life has ended? I hope not, so I will not consider this again. From now on I shall try to ignore such unproductive thoughts and focus on what is really important. If I do not focus I will likely freeze to death in this cave -- even if it is my own imagination.

The rope was beautiful. It had incredible girth and seemed to go on forever into the bowels of the mountain. It hung from the ceiling of the cave in which I stood and went down into an immeasurably deep hole in the floor. I had no choice but to reach out and grasp the rope. Unfortunately at the same time I lost my footing on the edge of the pit. Even though I had hold of the rope the Great Blanket of Barsaive overpowered me and I went sliding down the rope quite some distance.

There is an unseen force in Barsaive that keeps everything where it belongs -- on the ground. We, the Name-givers, have tried very hard to overcome this force and in some instances we have succeeded. The airships on which we have been traveling are an example of how the weight of this blanket has been somewhat reduced. I am not familiar with the exact mechanics of these ships, but I imagine that powerful magics are required to keep the ships aloft for just a short amount of time.

The magician that travels with me, Tomas, has a very potent spell -- Levitation. I suspect that when he uses this spell the magic lifts the blanket so that those underneath the spot where he is lifting will rise up into the air unaffected by the Barsaivian Blanket.

This is the blanket of which I speak. It was softly pushing me down the rope quite rapidly. I tried to hold on to the great rope. I very much wanted to make the rope my friend.

I came to an abrupt halt in my descent when I landed on what I would later find out was a contraption to go up and down the great rope. When I finally came to a stop after falling off my vertical conveyance I noticed all of my comrades were there: Ulm, Silar, Mica, Tomas and Dorra were all very concerned about my well being. It was touching, but I told them we must press on with our mission.

I now remembered what our mission was. We were here looking for a special magic book that would let us banish some evil creatures that were attacking airships.

We were standing in what appeared to be a tiny underground city. By tiny I do not mean to say that the city was unusually small, but that the buildings themselves were smaller than normal. Actually they were the perfect size for windlings. Since there were a lot of windling skeletons I concluded that this must have been a windling city. Many of the buildings had been destroyed or toppled over. We needed to be very careful in case whatever destroyed the city was still here.

We got into the conveyance attached to the great rope. Mica took his place at the crank. By turning the crank in one direction we could go down the rope, and the other direction would take us up (I hoped).

Down we went. I was told by my friends that they had battled some wasp type creatures. These were not normal wasps, they said, but giant wasps. My friends were attacked while traveling down the rope from the cavern that I first saw the great rope to the larger cavern with the windling city. I told them that I did not see any creatures on my trip down the rope, but I did go down kind of fast.

After some time of going down the rope we entered a large cavern. This one was even larger than the cavern with the windling city above us. We could see that this cavern also had a city in it. This city was also demolished by some force. We halted our descent to explore this city a bit. We had noticed from the rope carriage a large black body of some sort and we wanted to see what it was.

We discovered that the large black thing was some kind of giant insect. It was dead, which was very good. It looked like this creature was the cause of some of the destruction here. This city was also littered with windling skeletons and destroyed buildings.

We continued our descent. After some time we entered an even larger cavern. In here we could hear a waterfall off in one direction that appeared to fill an underground lake. We could not actually see the waterfall, that is some indication of how big this cavern was. We could see the lake, since the great rope came to an end a short distance from the lake.

A horrible thing happened before we reached the floor of the cavern. The great rope snapped and broke. It must have been our great weight, accompanied by the rope's great age. This contraption was designed for lighter folk than ourselves, so I feel partly responsible for the destruction of this beautiful piece of rope work.

After the rope broke there was nothing holding us up, so the Barsaivian Blanket pushed us down. We landed on a building and broke through the first couple levels of it. Some of us were wounded but none were seriously hurt. We clambered out of the wreckage and with the help of Tomas's levitation spell we got all of our equipment back. After that we decided to rest a bit.

It was a very eerie feeling, being in the middle of a long-dead windling city. It got even spookier when we started to smell the smoke of a campfire coming from the underground lake. We had enough rest so we decided to investigate. We made our way through a series of windling towers that were on the edge of the lake. I should mention that it is very strange walking through a town when you are taller than many of the buildings!

On the other side of the towers, on the shore of the lake, sat a creature. It looked somewhat humanoid but it was hard to tell exactly what it was. Everyone else stayed hidden in the cluster of buildings while I went to negotiate use of the being's boat. It seems he knew we were all there, even though some were hiding. The thing probably had very good senses, having lived in such a dark, quiet place. For use of its barge, raft, boat-type thing, the creature only required one item, Silar's hat.

After the others spent some time bartering with the being, we left on the raft, leaving the creature to finish cooking its fish.

We headed across the lake to the side of the cavern where there was supposed to be a cave entrance high up in the wall. When we reached the side of the cavern we saw that the buildings there were mostly submerged. We found the cave entrance we were looking for; it was thirty feet above our heads. We decided to get some sleep before continuing our quest so we went to the shore of the lake. We did not go back to the place where that strange creature was. He was too spooky for most of the others. During my watch that night I swear I could see that creature starting another fire and cooking Silar's hat.

When we had all gotten enough sleep and eaten the morning meal we set out across the lake again. We climbed a rope I told to secure itself in the entrance. This cave was just big enough to walk through. It had carvings in the walls of happy windlings doing happy windling stuff. We walked down this cave until it opened into a larger cavern with a big building built into the side of the wall. This building was even big enough for Ulm to walk into! There were lots of windling skeletons here as well, but these seemed much better armed than previous ones we had seen. It looked as if this were their last stand. There was another one of those giant insects inside the building. We explored the building but except for the top floor there was not much besides windling skeletons.

In the ceiling was what looked like a set of stone doors with an inscription carved into it:

Only one of purest heart,
Tainted by the darkest evil.

We were all very worried about what might be above that doorway. Also we were unsure as to what was needed to open it, until Ulm came across a petrified windling heart. I am not sure if this is what made it possible to open the doorway. Silar took the heart, stood on Ulm's shoulders, then pulled on the handles of the doors. They swung down, but no horrible creatures followed, so I was very happy. Silar climbed up into the room above where he found the Tome of Banishment and a dead windling.

We decided to get out as quickly as we could. We climbed down out of the cave and got back onto the raft. We returned the raft to the thing on the shore. We had much discussion on how to get back up the shaft that the great rope hung down. Since it had broken some fifty feet or so above the ground, and the platform we stood on to get down was nearly destroyed, escaping would not be as easy as getting in.

Eventually we decided to let Tomas use his levitation spell to get us out of the caverns. It was kind of risky because of the height involved, but it worked. He lifted us all to the top cavern where the great rope was hanging. Near the entrance to the cave was a drakkar that we all got on and Dorra started to pilot out of the cave. I could feel some of my memories coming back.

It was only a short trip to where the Passion's Wind was waiting for us. When it came into view we saw that it was being attacked by a large black war ship.

Rensil