I blinked once. Where was I? Why was I here?

A memory from what felt like a lifetime ago flashed through my mind. It was of me meeting the mysterious being that turned my life upside down.

I then realized that the scene was not flashing through my mind, but rather on the wall in front of me. It was made of a dark mineral, over which was layered a cloudy opaque material. Inspecting it closer yielded nothing, except a strange gold and black box that flashed once into my vision, before getting smothered by smoke. The odd moving motions within the hazy substance just made my head dizzy.

Error!

Scholar Livy

I don’t know where you ended up, but it’s in a pocket realm out of Ishaka’s reach. It’s powerful and heavily laden with enchantments, so many I can’t even tell which is which. Be very and I mean VERY careful, you're in some creature’s lair.

I put my hand out to steady myself against the cool wall, and tried to search around in the dim ambient light. I tried to look for the source, and it seemed to come from the walls. With not much to go on I tried to see what was going on.

My vision adjusted to the low light and focused on the objects in the hazy air around me. There were a handful of small tables and chairs where hooded figures sat hunched around, carefully whispering to each other, each one sounding as confused as I was. Several other men stood in front of blank plaques, like the one in front of me, and an elven woman sat in the corner, holding a black coin to her lips.

There was a single door of dark wood planks with iron bands leading deeper into the lair, and flanking it were two towering suits of armour, with black robes and hoods over their heads. Their helmets were angled, flat slabs of dark metal, polished to a mirror like finish.

A whispering voice came from the door behind them, and a metal bar set in the door slid across revealing a masked stranger. The metal mask looked like a crying goblin and the figure whispered with a slithering voice. “Approach Lord Hale, for the master expects you.”

“What?” I asked, completely dumbfounded.

The metal bar slammed closed and the strange man opened the door to usher me in with a tired wave. We entered an impossibly long castle hallway that stretched on for eternity. I walked with him, inspecting the seemingly endless array of different doors, each one built of different wood, metal or stone. I counted a few made of sparkling gemstones and when I reached out to touch one the short masked man slapped my hand away.

“Do you know where you are?” he asked.

“A hallway, I think,” I said.

“Ugh, nevermind. Come, the master can see you now.” The short man shuffled up to a random door that was similar to any of the others. “Consider yourself lucky that he shows you his presence, it is the highest honour. Only the inner circle typically has seen ones of his forms. Lesser beings have gone mad from seeing him, and displeasing him.”

“Oh don’t worry, we’re friends,” I said. “I think. I honestly can’t remember.”

The strange short man opened the door for me and shoved me through with a surprising amount of force. I stumbled into Icharn’s room, the name coming to me out of nowhere, and it looked like someone's downstairs game room. There was a pool table, a well stocked bar, and a TV playing a hockey game with a big plush sofa facing it. The coffee table at the foot of the sofa had pizza, soda and chips. I tried to catch a glimpse of who was playing, and as I stepped onto the carpet the air got hazy again. I watched the room twist and distort, with only the carpet below my feet remaining unchanging. It settled on being a plain office, with the table from Paul’s shop, and a pair of simple dining chairs on either side.

There were a few bookshelves around the room, and a curtain hanging over some string to separate another part of the room. I heard Icharn speaking in a strange language, with two feminine voices chiming in. One was musical and bright, like a rush of spring air, and the other was more smokey, and alluring, massaging my ears as it invited me to hang onto their every word.

“Take a seat Josh,” Icharn called from beyond the curtain. “Fine, let’s take a five minute break. Thank you Heniekia and Ishaka, I’m glad to see SOME PEOPLE have common sense as part of their godly powers.”

Icharn parted the curtain, and mostly closed it. He was in his form I saw more often, or I thought I saw more often. He was draped in shadow, wore voluminous black robes, had skeletal hands and a black mirror where his skull should be. As he walked towards me I caught him flipping off the table behind him where I saw a gameboard of some sort.

It was a massive sprawling map with playing cards, sheets of paper and miniature figures strewn about it. A bowling ball sized glass ball beside the map shone with a kaleidoscope of colours as strange voices shouted from within it. Behind the ball was a large, normal looking glass mirror that was set into something that looked like a giant abacus. When I looked at the odd contraption I had a small pop up asking me how I wanted the mirror angled.

Icharn sat down on a stool beside the table with a huff and looked at me. “Oh right.” The shadowy god snapped his fingers and all my muddy feelings shattered, letting me think clearly. “Take a seat, and feel free to ask a question or two. I’ll consider it a favour as I would like to take my mind off politics for a few minutes.”

I sat down across from him, and remembered my purpose for being here. “Ah, the book. I didn’t get a chance to look at it much, what is it?” I took the book out of my bag and felt it vibrate violently in my hands. As soon as I held it out the thing shot out of my hands and into Icharn’s.

“Nothing good, considering it got me in a lot of trouble,” Icharn growled. He held up the book in one hand and shook it. “Some of the other gods got very, and I mean very, upset that some of my followers had begun to crack the code like the old empires did. They threatened to bring another cataclysm or war to put a stop to it, but luckily for all of us they snuffed each other out.”

I pushed out with my feet to slide back and looked at it worriedly. “Is it because of the golem minions?”

“What?” Icharn asked. He opened up the book and flipped through it. “Oh no, that’s not a worry at all. Most wizards who focus on golem creation make something similar because it’s cheaper and effective for a form. No, they had started to uncover a very special type of magic that is reserved for a few people in the upper circles of godhood. Now, if you just give me a moment I need to strike this from all records in Ewyernar.”

Quest Complete!

Icharn has gained a book containing forbidden knowledge from the world. Now he is able to remove it from Ewyernar. Congrats, you stopped a possible apocalypse!

+150 XP gained.

+2 Minor boons from Icharn.

“Oh come on!” Icharn shouted at the ceiling. The god grumbled and fished around his pockets, taking out a deck of cards. “By the way, you made a really good choice before. Somehow Heniekia’s boons got into mine, but since you gave it to one of her own she considered it legal. Saved a lot of problems on my end. Guess the big boss upstairs decided to give you a reward anyway.”

Error!

Skill check : failure!

That was odd. This pop up looked glitched, as the edges of the message bled into the text and it had a scrambled background, like white noise on a TV. I saw the gold and black box beside it and wondered if the scholars could give me a clue.

Scholar Issa

We don’t get to know who influences and balances the gods, it’s one the great mysteries of the universe. I hope you get fun boons! Or more fudge, you can never have enough fudge. Feel free to ask Icharn to send us some.

Icharn put the deck on a flat plate that materialized under his hand and slid it towards me. Shadowy smoke leapt from my shadow and slammed into the table in front of me, transforming into papers with the names of my friends. Icharn looked up from his book at them with mild curiosity, as if he was surprised. He turned back to the book and tapped at the pages with a black feather that was as long as my arm with a barbed purple tip that splashed midnight blue ink onto his sleeves. That quill gave me a weird glitched error too.

I reached for the deck and I had a distinct feeling I was missing something here. I picked up the entire deck which grabbed Icharn’s attention again, and I started to shuffle them. Icharn once again turned back to the book and hummed to himself as he grumbled about the paperwork.

I could see the abacus mirror thing over his shoulder and at a simple mental push from me I saw it tilt. I couldn’t make out the map as it was too zoomed in. As I tried to think about that a little scroll appeared in the corner of my vision and it had a list of controls for it. I was mentally able to control it, and the mirror zoomed out to reveal a familiar looking area. It looked like the map Yara and Lin had shown me earlier, but with way more detail. Stuff like elevation, cities, rivers and more. Whatever was showing in the very middle of the mirror also had a small pop up beside it to give relevant information.

I saw a game piece on the map near the river and when I got the mirror aimed at it I saw the words ‘Wyrmbreath’ appear. It gave me a quick run down, it was a city of goblins, with a population of 45000 residents and 1000 refugees in the city and surrounding farming caves. That was a lot more refugees than I had last seen. Icharn shook out his wrist, complaining about a cramp and the mirror lurched.

I saw the mirror sweep across the forest, showing a giant tree piece that was ‘occupied’ by gnomes, and a game piece that was of a crystal on a pedestal. It was my dungeon, and right beside it was a copper game piece that looked like a rook from chess. The information came by quickly, but I caught ‘goblin engineer tower’ and ‘underground’ as two pieces of info that were in bold.

The mirror zoomed out, and I saw the giant tree was quite close to me. The mirror then swept across the forest, and reached a mountain range that was near a massive city, Dastow. I tried to twist the mirror to it, but it was being controlled by another, and the scroll in the corner of my vision vanished. The mirror started to move away, and I caught a glimpse of two other crystals on pedestals. One at the top of the mountains near Dastow, and one at the far side of the big forest with the giant tree.

Voices came from the crystal ball and Icharn’s head snapped to look at it. “Hey, quit it Borros, we are on break. Damn dwarf god, never stops trying to work us to the bone.” Icharn waved his skeletal hand and chuckled. “Some of us more than others.”

I could see Icharn was done so I got ready to pull my two cards, and knew I should ask something, anything. So I asked the first thing that came to my mind. “What’s the fourth minion type I unlocked?”

“Caster type, get a small team of them. They are expensive but since you took that individualist trait they work really well,” Icharn said, sounding intrigued. “You can split them up and they come with one rank in magical crafting. So get one to be a cleric, another a wizard and so on. They can make scrolls pretty well, and minor items, but don’t expect them to fight. They usually only get one or two mana points, plus they get manablight easily.”

I instantly added it to the minion work order que. We could only get one now, but that was exactly what we needed. We were painfully low on unused mana crystals and if we got hit with another winter storm I was worried we would burn out our remaining heating crystals in short order. I didn’t trust myself to make them when we were critically low, and I felt bad asking Sliva or Rolada to take time out of their day to make them.

Icharn looked at the deck. “I don’t mean to sound full of myself, but being a god is a busy job.”

“Sorry,” I said. I hesitated to pull the card as my next question fell out of my mouth. “Are there more humans here from Earth, and can I get home if I wanted?”

“Yes,” Icharn said. He leaned back in the chair and looked at the ceiling. “As for something that far away, you will need to be a much higher level with a bunch of traits and talents from a wizard class, like level fifteen or so. Otherwise there's some artifacts, and even a few great mages that can send you there for a cost. Their rip offs though.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Give or take fifty thousand gold for a three day trip, that’s if you want to come back,” Icharn said, shrugging. “Gods can only transport mortals back and forth from the Nexus and across Ewyernar. Stupid rules.”

“Hang on,” I said. “But didn’t you bring me here-”

By this point I could hear aggressive sounds coming from the crystal ball and I bit my tongue. I pulled the top two cards and set the rest down on the plate, sliding them to Icharn. I held them up and got ready to drop them on my own page.

Boon of Charming Hair - Facial Hair

A charming beard appears on your face. If you already have a beard it becomes perfectly waxed, oiled or shaped to the owner's desired shape, changing length and colour. This boon lasts for one month and at the end of the month the beard owner gets one last chance to change it, with their beard adopting that shape as it returns to normal.

Boon of Magical Item

A random small magical item will appear on your person, or in a suitable container nearby, or in a safe place. The power of this item can vary.

Scholar Terrive

Be careful, there’s a 10% percent chance the magical item can be cursed.

The ‘Golden Knowledge’ pop up appeared on its own, and I felt grateful for the gift already. I put the magic item card on a paper with my own name, I could probably try to figure out if it's cursed on my own. For the beard however, well there was only one person deserving of that one, and I was sure they could have some fun with it.

Sten has been given the ‘Boon of Charming Hair - Facial Hair’.

“Ah, you finally take something for yourself, good lad,” Icharn said with approval. “Get every advantage you can get, I don’t want to see you snuffed out so easily. I have some emotional investment here.”

I looked at the deck that was still on the table, and I tried my luck. “You could slide that back over here-”

Persuasion check : Failure!

“Nice try,” Icharn said, wagging his finger. “I’m going to skip the usual process and just send you home, have fun.”

Before I could blink I felt a twisting pull behind me, and the chair I sat on tipped back. I felt my life flash before my eyes and as my heart pounded in my chest I tried to look at the mirror behind Icharn, one last time.

There was a chess piece with a banner behind it, and the words came to my mind, but I only caught a few lines of it.

Army of Keeper Slavo

Approximately 3000 strong

…

I shot up in bed, flinging an empty yellow bag off me, and found myself covered in empty packages. I slowly turned to the side to find Yara, Lin, Rolada and Sliva sitting around in a circle eating the fudge.

Rolada held up a small square and beamed as she opened her arms to show off the brand new onesie. “I see you had a good shopping trip.”