Recap Online Session 30.04.2018

Tylendel focuses on the Codex of the Lost and Ruís, trying to meditate himself to one or both of these...

...he finds himself on a dark, arid plain of thin black top soil, dust and gravel. In the distance rises a great wall of pulsing light, stretching along the horizon, possibly a thousand meters tall.
"Wow. Wow."

Willing himself closer, he hears rumbling; it vibrates through his feet up his body. The light seems to fade far above, and he cannot see where it descends. It lights up the landscape, but the landscape is flat and dark. Willing himself even closer, he now hears strange sounds from the vertical surface of the wall of light - as of a million whispered vocal sounds.

Then he hears an underlying sound, as of fires burning. He comes to a place where the top soil has been blown into a long dike, as if the light ahead has washed it away. Beyond, the ground is blank, flat cracked stone. He walks through the dike of dust and soil, and feels a warm breeze, which pushes the dust off him.

The light gets brighter, the air gets warmer. He spots an ordinary-looking wagon with a broken wheel. In the wagon he finds a skeleton and a long knife with a bone hilt and strange inscriptions, a language he doesn't know. It seems to have been used to cut loose two horses, judging by the tracks.

He can see shapes move about in the curtain of light; from a great distance, the wall looked like it pulsed in waves; now it looks to be composed of countless smaller, more flitting elements.
Tylendel continues walking toward the awesome curtain of light. He wills himself a little closer a few more times, reaching a place where the landscape descends into a very wide, shallow basin. Crossing the basin is a cleft, from which the light seems to flow (either upward or downward).

Eventually he stands right before this massive, impossible momument of swirling light; whenever it pulses bright, a strong gust of wind issues forth, rolling up the basin sides. A spectral hand reaches out for him; when he pushes it away, it dissolves, leaving him with a burn mark. Tylendel manages to stand against it. Curiously, he doesn't smell anything specific, but he now notices that the light does seem to go into the cleft. He sees people now, myriads, swimming downward into that cleft. A transparent film seems to separate him from the swimmers in the light. "Are you the dead of Eras?" he asks aloud, but there is no answer.

Tylendel...steps into the phenomenon... and is assaulted by the whispering voices a hundred times louder; the light is so intense inside that all he sees is white - and then he is dragged down...into a maelstrom of light.

Weightless and shifting, occasionally bumping into rock, feeling like he's entangled in cobwebs, he is pulled down until something hits him in the leg - hard. Then is pulled by a chain out of the light and onto hard ground - with a hook through his armor and his leg. The air smell of burning charcoal. A gravelly grunting voice speaks, but Tylendel doesn't understand. He realizes Syr Dostan is trying to wake him up. "Not now," Tylendel says. Something lifts him up and throws him over a very broad shoulder. Whatever it is, it stinks of sweat. "Are you a giant?" Tylendel asks, but whatever is carrying him only replies in a strange, guttural language.

It carries him down a wide spiraling staircase, throws him to the ground - Tylendel manages to avoid landing on his injured leg. Then he hears a door slamming shut. The language Tylendel heard reminds him of the voice spoken by the undead warrior he encountered in the Vychrib Hills, a few years ago.

Realizing he is alone, he picks up Shadowbreaker to see that is inside a roughly circular chamber. Manacles and shackles surround him. A large two-step stair leads up to a door of the same black stone as the rest of the chamber. In the middle of the chamber is a black shaft or pit. Its sides are blank and black.

He drags himself to the stairs, then manages to clamber up them, but the massive slab of stone that is the door has no handle, no lock. Using his sorcery, Tylendel turns the door to sand and finds himself in a wide, spacious hallway with another similar door and, on the other end, the wide, spiraling staircase. Using his fiery blade, Red Dancer, as a crutch he stumbles out into the hallway.

The other door has a lever, which Tylendel pulls. The door immediately slides up into the roof, to Tylendel's astonishment.

Inside sits a two-and-a-half meter long man wrapped in the hides of various animals. When he turns, Tylendel sees the man has no eyes; just empty pits. His jaws hangs by its tendons, his skin is pale as death - and his odor too, is reminiscent of the grave. A two-handed sword stands by a wall and he reaches for it, and goes to stand before Tylendel, grunting something and pointing toward the cell.

"Who is your master?" Tylendel asks, then lists up a host of names of supernatural beings. Then, a small old man comes chuckling down the stairway. "You forgot to mention me..." he says. In the glow of Red Dancer's light, Tylendel sees the glint of iron where the old man's teeth should be.
"Ah, the Crow-king," Tylendel realizes.
"Yes, I have been called that. At last you fall into my hand," the old man says.
"Are they the souls of Eras?" Tylendel asks, referring to the maelstrom of light.
"If you want it to be," the old man with the iron nails for teeth responds.
"How can you steal the light from a world?" Tylendel asks.
"It is not I," the Crow-king replies. "Light diminishes, when Parafor is awake.."