They spotted a pair of rugnegs again, sunning themselves on a patch of earth in their way. Kyessy considered this for a short time before pulling her bow out, nocking an arrow, and letting fly. On the way, the arrow first erupted into flame, before it multiplied into a dozen with Flurry of Arrows. A dozen exploding, fiery arrowheads now blasted the rock monster, which roared and fixed its floaty crystal eyes on her. The other did as well.

Another fiery, unerring flurry took the creature in the face, which stopped it dead and allowed her to nock a third explosive salvo killed it. Corbin was surprised not to get any notifications of XP or ‘you can’t carry loot or coins’ upon its death, and realized that he’d been part of every other fight. This time he hadn’t done anything, which negated XP rewards.

Well that wouldn’t stand. He dove down and pecked at the second one with a Fierburst arrow, and enjoyed the 35 damage he caused, even if it was only a tiny fraction. Then he flapped up out of the way when Kyessy’s dozen exploding arrows came whistling up and blasting it in the side.

Two more volleys like that and the second rugneg was out, giving him XP and the notification they’d come upon an echocrystal shard, which was a surprise. They also got elemental essence, which sounded rare and expensive.

“Echocrystal shards,” she remarked. “Hrm.” Then, following his True Sight, she fished down in the thick silt for the damn thing. Each time she emerged from the water, she immediately scrambled up and onto one of those grassy earthen lumps. He stifled a bout of chuckles… she really did hate water, and pissing her off had only spelled disaster in the past.

“If you killed it without exploding it, do you think they’d drop echocrystals?”

“It’s possible.” But they had the echocrystals they needed.

“Hang on… let me inspect one of the echocrystals we’ve got.”

Success! You have inspected the item.

Echocrystal (full).

Description: This item is constructed of pure magic to contain the essence of a non-living being, such as an element, the spirit of a non-sentient being, or the soul of a sentient being. This echocrystal contains the soul of a nellwynian dungeon skulk.

Origin: For crafting purposes, most echocrystals require magical elemental essence to create. [tap here to find out more about magical elemental essence]. Echocrystals are generally manufactured in wizards’ workshops, though creatures created by infusing essence can manufacture echocrystals by mating. The origin of this particular echocrystal cannot be determined with your skill level. Why not increase your Inspect skill, or your Intelligence?

Usage: Echocrystals are useful in thousands of powerful rituals where neither the caster or subject wish to give up their own souls. The soul within can be bound into an inanimate object or non-sentient being, or sacrificed for a significant boost in magical power. You don’t currently have any crafting recipes involving echocrystals. Why not increase your Intelligence or your Knowhow: craft magical items to learn some?

“Give me some friggin’ skill points and I’d be happy to increase plenty of things!” he yelled.

“What?”

“I may be slightly bitter at the thing constantly telling me what to do,” he told her. “Out of curiosity, why attack these elementals? We avoided them before.”

“I haven’t really gotten to know this explosive arrow ability. Also, tired of going around.”

She also resolved to get to know the entangling razor vines arrow. They came upon a tenrill next, which Corbin was able to spot before it launched itself up out of the water at her face, and she wrapped it up in squeezing vines before it could slice her face off or disembowel her. Corbin dove in to peck at it, but could hardly get a beak on it with all the vines sprouting out of the arrow. Luckily he did 2 points of damage and did get some XP out of the deal, along with a tenrill egg. He figured they were instrumental in some ritual or another, but Kyessy told him they were decent for making omelettes or scrambling, given that tenrills weren’t magical.

Another two hours later, and they began to draw closer to the first magewood that wasn’t dead. This thing was colossal, a full three or four hundred feet easy, with a root system you could’ve built a decent-sized town into. The leaves were the size of houses back in New York, and whole species of vines, bushes, and other trees tried their luck at competing against it.

“If we’re lucky, no wyrms will have made this one into a hoard.”

“Wyrms as in… dragons?”

She shrugged. “Like a tenrill only about a hundred times bigger, and many have wings. Feathers are optional.”

“Dragon, got it. And these wyrms… the swamp-dwelling ones are foul and repulsive,with black scales and poison breath and such?”

She shook her head, telling him to stop making assumptions about this world. Honestly, the doily monster had been a joke, but Kyessy had made perhaps one joke in the entire week they’d been together. “Swamp wyrms are fastidious, which is why they look for magewood trees for their hoards. The wood is good for cleaning their scales and scratching between their claws, but they have attendant species to clean between their teeth. Draklings.”

“Draklings.”

“Foul little creatures… imagine if tenrill somehow mated with a nellwynian, and produced something without feathers.” A short little lizard dragon person who attended to dragons, called draklings, sounded just like kobolds, or certain versions of goblins. “They’ll undoubtedly have a whole civilization on the magewood tree, regardless of the danger, if there’s a wyrm. Everywhere you have wyrms you have drakling cities.”

The danger she was referring to turned out to be the tree itself. It wasn’t just made of sturdy wood, the tree had magic defenses. His Inspect went on and on, plenty of scrolling, regarding all the different spell effects it could call up per season. It was much more likely to use lightning attacks, for instance, during the wet and stormy summer months, and much more likely to use cold and blizzard attacks during the miserable winters. It had wind spells for whisking intruders off its branches, explosions of thorns, and whole separate species under its command that would swarm and remove intruders, or just kill them.

Magewood was no joke. This entire stretch of the swamps and this world was no joke either.

He eventually did find the sleeping wyrm, a magnificent thing of sinuous, verdant green curled up in the high branches. It was level 58, and had almost as many hit points as Prissy’s gigantic prick of an ex-husband. It could fly, had a breath weapon (unknown at this time, why not increase your tolerance for annoying and repetitive suggestion messages?) and was having a pretty awesome dream, because its scales had bands of various colors coursing down from its head, in waves of red-purple-blue, or yellow-orange-red, and its claws were twitching.

The draklings had spotted Kyessy as well, and he confirmed his suspicions: they were basically kobolds, done up in scraps of fur and leather, with wood and scavenged weapons. His favorite was a nailbat, where instead of a rusted iron nail, it had the claw of some creature fixed on there. Many had set up shacks in the magewood’s roots, and many others on raised platforms just off the magewood. Lots of these platforms had been destroyed and were sticking up willy-nilly. They weren’t shoddy builders so much as they were doing constant damage control. Corbin spotted repair teams working on a series of pitons that would give them access to the dragon, since some were clearly missing. One repair team was anchored to the magewood and trying to get their system fixed up, while others with crampons fought the magewood’s symbiotic vine and bush species.

They advanced past without incident, unless you called distant verbal harassment by two foot barely sentient lizard people as an incident. Kyessy explained they were just warning the ranger away from their dragon, which she had no wish to wake up, let alone try and kill.

The swamp was intermittently flat and expansive, Big Sky country, and other times claustrophobic, filled with wretched-looking twisted trees that looked ready to grab and eat you. And though he’d hoped for solid land throughout, there simply wasn’t a steady supply of that either. Kyessy trekked from those weird humps of grassy land, and then across nothing but long stretches of waist and chest-deep water. She hated every moment of mucking through that, given the anatomy quirk that had given her unparalleled footing on rocks and mountains, but awful footing in this particular squelchy, awful terrain.

Eventually, after fighting more tenrills, another blaskarand, and a new monster just made of water called an aquallian, they reached a series of low hills rising out of the swamps. The explosive arrow had really shredded the blaskarand, much to Kyessy’s delight. She kept chunks of it for cooking.

Before they came within 500 feet of the hills, though, Corbin spotted several hidden figures, and identified them as echion.

Echion Sentinel

Level 14

493/493 HP

The echion were created and used in wars long past, between the denizens of the Pit and those of Heaven. These were meant to rival other tools of holy and unholy creation. When the war ended, some Echion remained and forged a path without the masters to guide them.

Notably, echion hate the cold of winter. Some migrate south, but many have taken deserts and jungles to be their territories, due to the lack of sustained cold.

Special: Echion are immune to psychic attacks, and have natural venom immunity. Many echion have venomous bites.

Upgrading his Intelligence and Inspect was serving him pretty well. But Luck had served him best of all… too many things he wanted to upgrade and not enough points.

“Uh… how are you going to convince them you’re not here to attack them?” He asked.

“Spotted them already?” she asked, frowning.

“Over on your left, ten o’clock. And another at two o’clock, fifty feet off.”

She cupped her hands around her mouth in a passable megaphone, and spoke in a new language full of hissing and spitting that Corbin understood because telepathy.

“I am Kyesiara, Ranger of the Spine of Creation. I would parley with you!”

“My familiar and I would parley with you, is what you should’ve said.”

“Yes, I definitely wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”

“Why don’t they call them serpentians?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she grumbled.

The snake person rose out of the water and up to its full height of about six and a half feet. It was powerfully muscled, with a lower body tapering into an enormous snake tail. It had a humanoid midsection and arms, but covered in gleaming scales, while its head was that of a cobra. Its expressionless eyes fixated on her, and its tongue flickered out to taste the air. In one hand it held a javelin, while in the other it had a spear with several wicked barbs coming off the base of the pointy part.

Since he could now detect auras, Corbin peeked in, and discovered the serpent-person’s aura wasn’t there. Actually it was hidden behind a wall of greenish energy. Something was under there, but it practically had a sticker saying maybe consider increasing your Perception or Inspect, you lousy bum.

“You’ve come a long way from the Spine,” the echion sentinel said. “What’s your business in our swamps?”

“We seek knowledge,” she said. “I am given to believe your people understand much in the way of spellcraft and ritual magic.”

“We can pay,” Corbin offered.

In his mind, she shrieked, full-caps style. “STOP MAKING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THIS WORLD!”

His fading hangover reignited with a vengeance. He also shrieked, a different kind of shriek, and nearly fell off her shoulder. Luckily he managed to stay upright.

The sentinel regarded her. “Your companion hails from beyond the portal.”

“True.”

“We will treat with you. You will be welcomed as guests. However, it should be understood that you will surrender your weapons and hold your abilities in your hand at all times.”

“The cards,” Corbin said, noting her confusion.

She nodded, and in short order another three of the serpent folk surrounded her and brought her back toward one of the hills. Corbin saw the opening in the hillside before she did, given his True Sight: a cave entrance obscured by cleverly wrought foliage. The sentinel peeled this back, and they descended a set of stairs alongside a wide, steep ramp system. The echion with snake tails slithered along this, while another serpent folk with legs walked along behind her.

Lighting was provided by magic: buttery flames in the shape of hooded cobra heads watched them pass. And absolutely every surface, either wall or ceiling had been carved or decorated with low relief motifs that Corbin wanted to put in the realm of Aztecs, if the civilization had advanced another thousand years in artistic sensibilities instead of being driven to the brink of extinction.

At the entryway, she was asked to place her weapons on a squat stone pedestal milled a bit, so it was more like a bowl. Then, she produced all her cards. The serpent folk looked these over, glanced to Corbin, and allowed them further.

You have entered a high-level dungeon!

I hope you know what you’re doing!

“Gulp,” Corbin thought, and realized she couldn’t hear his thoughts without the card being equipped, so he spoke it aloud.

“You will not speak unless spoken to,” she instructed. “Under no circumstance are you to mention payment of any kind. These people live under a very different set of strictures than Fellwroth, Denspire, the fae, the dwarfs, or my people.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I cannot help you if I’ve become their prisoner for a year and a day.”

They were herded into the first large doorway available to the right, something Corbin would label a conference room mixed with a spa. A pool of glowing green water sat in the center of the floor, with a number of the echion people curled up around it. Two of the five of them had ‘human’ faces, though their chins were bisected to allow the jaw to separate to swallow large amounts whole.

Kyessy sat at the last place, where a cushion had been placed for her. Crossing her legs was another reminder of how much she wasn’t a human.

“Thank you for allowing me to enter.”

He wanted to ask whether she’d swapped her Charm for her Agility or Strength before they’d gotten her to remove all her cards, but kept his beak shut.

“What is the nature of your inquiry today?” One of them asked.

“I have been tasked with gathering materials for a ritual, yet I do not know the nature of the ritual. I suspect the warlock who will cast this spell will use it for evil purposes.”

“As payment for this line of inquiry–” the echion said, causing a pang of indignation to Corbin, “–we will require information out of you and your companion.”

“In what regard?” Kyessy asked.

“The other world, the portal, and the political climate of our neighbors to the northwest.”

“I would like to stipulate,” Kyessy said.

The echion nodded sagely. “Add a stipulation for our consideration.”

She held up his Familiar card. “This ability will allow you to understand the language of the familiar companion, this… bird who has accompanied me here, with the understanding that once our inquiry is concluded, the card be returned to me. I’m afraid this stipulation is out of pure selfishness, as I tire easily of translating. The bird has firsthand knowledge of the other world.”

Corbin wasn’t sure what sound was coming out of the assembled snake people, but after a little while he decided it was probably hissing laughter.

“We have agreed to your stipulation,” the leader said. “We offer no stipulation in return.”

“It is agreed then,” Kyessy said.

“It is agreed.”