Elnamerrna senior crew
Experiencing a shared vision
Date not known
Tyfelian nearly stumbled backward into the starboard door to the bridge. His back brushed the door, but he brought himself away from it again to try to get his bearings. He reacted just fast enough that the guard there glanced at him curiously, but then looked away, seeing nothing of importance besides Tyfelian himself.
Tyfelian's reaction had been caused not so much by the sudden change of scene, but by the fact that the bridge had a ceiling again.
He noted Kiran, Jaclyn, and Tash swaying unsteadily at the open doorway on the portside. Jalaysa was standing from the spelljammer helm; she smiled at Tash, apparently happy to see her, and casually surrendered the post.
The four of them recognized the situation; it seemed like a completely routine change of Watch, from Evening to Day.
Tyfelian raised his eyebrows hard, and gave them a very slight nod. He wanted to play along with this, to see exactly what was happening. After a slight hesitation, Tash took the helm, and Tyfelian waved Kiran and Jaclyn to the back of the bridge.
There, Alzja apparently caught on and stood, giving Tyfelian the captain's chair. As Kiran sat down to his left, Tyfelian, on sudden impulse, turned his head to read the mechanical clock and calendar.
3 14 2461 Engethi Years.
Tyfelian's eyes widened. He nudged Kiran to get his attention, then pointed at the clock and calendar with his eyes.
The paladin gasped.
"That date is from the past!" he whispered to the half-drow. "Right before we found that rogue crystal shell and lost two weeks!"
"Time travel?" Tyfelian murmured to Alzja.
"Maybe... just a moment," the drow lady replied, and began casting a spell.
"Bridge, crow's nest," the voice horn called in Trula's voice.
Kiran looked at the horn apprehensively, bracing himself for a repeat performance of the horrible experience that his memory told him was coming, but no such thing happened.
After a second's hesitation, Tyfelian grabbed the voice horn and twisted its nut, almost eagerly. Perhaps they could somehow get some answers to baffling questions from this strange experience.
"Bridge, Tyfelian," he replied. He listened intently; according to his memory, he had barely even had a chance to answer Trula before the unpleasant effect hit the ship.
"Rogue crystal shell ahead and to starboard," the lookout called.
Tyfelian shared smiles with Kiran and Alzja, then raised his eyebrows at Tash as the blond drow turned her head around to look at him from the helm.
"Helm, full stop," he said to her, trying to act as he would normally act in such a situation.
Tash hesitated, but then obeyed the order. As she did so, Tyfelian raised a hand to move the outeye's view.
Sure enough, there was a crystal shell. It looked rather familiar.
"We can get to it in minutes," Tash said tentatively.
"One moment," Tyfelian replied. He looked at Alzja.
"No time travel. This is all an illusion... a very powerful one," Alzja told him and Kiran in drow sign language, mindful of the guards. "More like a dream. I wouldn't promise that things in it can't kill, though I doubt they can. Be leery o' that."
"Who's real here?" Tyfelian asked very quietly.
"You two, myself, Tash, and Jaclyn...and Trula, I'd assume," Alzja told him, "but she is in the crow's nest, so I can't say for sure."
"Go tell Tash and Trula everything they need to know, but warn them to tell no one else," Tyfelian ordered. "I want to see how this plays out. It'd be interesting to know what happened to us, regarding that rogue shell." He paused. "Also, after you tell Tash, get to the weapon bays and try to get a gunner to take a belt off. I want to know if they were impostors at this point in time."
"I agree, on both counts," Kiran whispered.
"Tash, take us there," Tyfelian said, at a normal voice volume. "Kiran, call battle stations."
Elnamerrna senior crew
Reliving the past of Rainmonth 14th, 2461
Greenmonth 27th, 2461
Tyfelian watched the outeye with great interest as the green lightning cleared and Tash cautiously eased the illusionary Elnamerrna into the portal and into the rogue shell.
The outeye showed a bizarre spectacle indeed when it could catch the rogue shell's interior. Instead of stars, the inner wall appeared to be lined with zigzagging, glowing lines that brightened and dimmed, seemingly at random. A fire body—or something luminous, at least—sat in the center of the shell, but it was like no sun Tyfelian had ever seen. Its dull, silvery-greenish light looked oddly mottled, as though it might not even be a single object. Not especially bright, either, Tyfelian noted.
Wispy clouds, or cloud-like streamers, filled the entire crystal shell, but these clouds or nebulae or whatever they were did not look like normal clouds. They more closely resembled dissipating smoke from a flare-up in a campfire.
"What kind of arrangement do we have here, Tash?" Tyfelian asked her.
"Five planets, all very small," the drow lady responded, examining the Locator. "All earth bodies. The sun shows up here, but the Locator doesn't know what kind of body it is."
This last statement got a reaction from everyone who heard it. Tyfelian peered at it closely, but despite the small size of the crystal shell, it was too far away to tell much about it.
"Take us past the planets, Tash. Let's have a look at each one. Avoid those weird clouds."
Tash willed the not-real ship into motion. Minutes took them to the outermost planet, which they found to be a heavily battered and burned rock ball with rings around it, covered with craters and small regions of molten lava. In addition, something had clearly blasted some parts of it completely off, and these seemed likely to be the debris that formed the rings.
The planet had apparently had oceans at one time, but they could easily see that the volcanic activity had boiled a good amount of the water away into space. Ocean basins gaped out at them, less than half filled with brownish ice. With the lava flows elsewhere, this made the planet look like the face of a tortured animal.
Tash glanced at Tyfelian.
"What could've done that?" she marveled quietly, fascinated despite her revulsion. "Something tore chunks off of that one," she stated, her voice heavy with wonder mixed with sadness.
Mystified, Tyfelian shook his head. He knew about the Cataclysm on the planet Krynn, the Twin Cataclysms on Oerth, and the Katrinka Disaster on his own home world, but this... something that could batter around an entire world... Tyfelian's mind could not even grasp at such force. Mortals could not wield that kind of power, by his knowledge. Only a god could do such things.
He looked at the broken world before his eyes, and then called to the helm.
"Next one, Tash."
When they came to that one, they found it to look much the same as the last, but with more molten lava—entire oceans of it. Whatever water this world might have had no longer existed. Its ruined landmasses looked like grotesquely twisted ribbons. Tyfelian shuddered, and he was not alone in that reaction.
The third planet offered some relief—it looked solid and spherical, though perhaps too smooth, and some seas of molten lava soured its surface. It had a small moon that looked nearly identical except that it was much smaller.
"Looks like this one really got melted, then cooled off hard," Tash murmured.
"Bridge, crow's nest," Trula called through the horn.
Tyfelian pretended to twist the nut on the voice horn—he'd kept it open to the crow's nest so that Trula could hear all of this.
"Bridge, Tyfelian."
"We're passing close to this one's moon. I spy me a city on that one. I'd bet my sword it's in ruins, but it's there."
"City?" Kiran blurted. "It must've had magical protection to survive what happ-... no, to even be there still, at all."
"Indeed," Tyfelian murmured. "Trula, spot its location so we can find it again. We'll come back to this one."
"Aye," Trula replied with interest.
Tyfelian relaxed a little; it felt increasingly simple to do the things he normally would, to play along, and let the events unfold as they had before. The Dridercomp reached out to him, guiding him, and he felt comforted. If he could behave normally, to be an actor and play himself, he felt sure that everything they saw would be accurate to what had happened during the time that his memory had lost.
Alzja came back to the bridge then, and walked over to Tyfelian.
"They are not impostors," she said to him quietly. "At this point, they're our own people, unless this illusion isn't accurate."
"Good to know," Tyfelian replied, then waved Alzja to a seat at the table. He was still very interested in what all this might reveal to him.
They flew by the remaining two planets, but found them to be even more hopeless than the first two. Some unimaginable force had incinerated the second planet out from the primary to such a degree that it had apparently turned to liquid rock, and then cooled down into an amorphous shape. It had some relatively large moons circling it. Some had obviously once been part of it, others not.
The last one, closest to the primary, turned out to be fully melted still, naught but a huge blob of magma orbiting the "sun." It had a moon, but that moon was only a somewhat cooled sphere of lava.
Tyfelian turned the outeye toward the sun as they left the innermost planet. Sure enough, it was the most bizarre primary of a shell he had ever seen or heard anything of. It looked like a weak hurricane in overall shape, but its arms were formed of rock or something similar, which glowed with an unearthly light that made Tyfelian feel uneasy. Those arms were limned with the grayish "clouds" of this rogue shell, and those clouds ebbed and flowed from the tips of the arms to the center. Here at the primary, the clouds had a faint, phosphorescent green tinge to them. This made the sun look even more unsettling.
The half-drow stared at the sun for as long as he could stand to—not long—then said, "Tash, take us back to the moon of the third planet."
Tash turned the Elnamerrna. As she did, the vision of the past changed for the six of them. Suddenly, they were floating in space, back near the inner shell wall. There, they witnessed a portal opening up to admit a ship.
That ship entered the shell at a slow pace. Tyfelian's expression hardened.
A small Elendran scout ship, he realized. He recognized its design, remembering the eleven spider ships that the Elnamerrna had fought in Elendraspace. Shaped like a black widow spider, as he recalled, designed for stealth. In combat, the design was not terribly effective except in numbers, and by use of the appalling gunpowder explosives.
The little ship eased into the wildspace here and moved off along the course that the Elnamerrna had taken an hour and a half earlier. Perfectly in its element as a spy vessel, its appearance changed, as well. Its hull had appeared covered with multi-colored splotches to resemble the Flow... but here, it turned dead black.
"Illusions... for stealth," Tyfelian commented to the others, but then they were back on the bridge.
"Stealth?" one of the guards asked curiously.
"Nothing... just thinking out loud," Tyfelian glossed it over quickly. "I was wondering if we should approach that moon by stealth, but I see no reason to, really."
The guard turned away again, satisfied.
"Artifacts truly mean business to show us something," Kiran signed clumsily to Tyfelian.
Tyfelian paused a moment to decipher the meaning (Kiran's command of drow sign was not complete, and his fingers' ability to express it was, at best, poor). He nodded, though he had a different thought. The change of perspective certainly meant that they were being shown something, not actually reliving events.
Tyfelian hoped that, as a result, they could not be killed in this illusionary setting. Learning these facts would do them little good if they died.
They returned to the third planet's moon and Trula again found the city she'd spotted earlier.
"A closer look, Tash," Tyfelian told her.
The blond drow willed the Silver Triop down toward the spot Trula had indicated. Presently, the outeye could show them the ruins of, not a city, but a place of strange constructs—arches, stone slabs placed in squarish designs, pillars of bizarre cone shapes that resembled pine trees overall, and the collapsed ruins of small buildings.
In the center of it all, a large pillar of stone and metal, easily a hundred feet tall, dominated the rest of the view. It resembled a gigantic black mushroom with an undersized cap, but multi-colored lines crisscrossed it. Tyfelian thought that they were magical runes, but he could not be sure.
"Put us down over there to the right, behind that pile of debris," he said to Tash.
Tash did.
"Shouldn't we leave guards?" Kiran asked as the crew began to disembark.
"No, no...I'll just tell Tash and Alzja to seal off the ship so no one but us can get into it."
They climbed down from the upper weapons bay together, and then climbed (truly) down to the surface. They drew their weapons immediately and looked around.
Nothing met them, so Tyfelian jerked his head to the crewmen behind him to call them out, then looked around quickly.
He moved to the back of the debris that he had noted from the air. It sat at the very edge of the ruins; that was one reason Tyfelian had chosen it as a landing site. Part of it formed a wall of boulders large enough to give cover to the Elnamerrna.
He poked a finger in the air toward the other end of the wall. Kiran moved off in that direction with some of the crew, while other crewmen hurried into line behind Tyfelian.
The half-drow peeked around the wall. He spotted nothing, but he felt no surprise at that.
Jaclyn moved up beside him as the wizards placed spells on the ship to keep unauthorized visitors out of it.
"I wonder where that Elendran ship is," Tyfelian murmured to her.
"No need to speak aloud," Jaclyn said in his mind.
Tyfelian blinked.
"Mindlink?" he mind-said back to her.
"Yes, but not my doing, exactly. It seems that we can do this now, because of a bond among the seven artifacts. I can mindlink with the other four, also... they can hear me now, but they cannot hear you. But you have to be willing... you can block me out at will."
Jaclyn got a small wave of emotion from Tyfelian, a mix of intrigue and curiosity.
"But as to the Elendran ship," Jaclyn mentally said to him, "no doubt they'll land their ship nearby somewhere, abandon it, then infiltrate our crew somehow."
Tyfelian abruptly realized that he had, by appearances, been quietly staring at Jaclyn for some moments. Some of the illusionary crew might get the wrong idea (Jaclyn being a rather attractive woman by the standards of her own kind and her age), and this would change the flow of events from historical accuracy, so he moved around the wall with apparent caution. He felt no real trepidation at all—he knew that he had survived visiting this place once before.
As they worked their way through the ruins, Tyfelian resumed the silent conversation.
"Those impersonation belts of theirs are really pieces of work—I'll have to get Alzja and Tash to find out how they work."
"Indeed," Jaclyn commented.
"My gut's screaming to me to yell out what I know to the crew -"
"This is only a dream, Ty, or a vision."
Tyfelian grunted agreement. "I know... and my curiosity's up. I want to know what happened to us here."
Jaclyn stepped over a broken rock and replied, "The artifacts aren't intelligent, but they're helping us remember all this, just as the Dridercomp helps you with intuition and insight. It seems the seven of them together have some very interesting abilities. I figure that this is only the skin of the apple," she finished.
Tyfelian flashed her a smile, then returned to the business of exploring this odd place. He knew, intellectually, that he had done it all before, but it was also a fact that he did not remember any of it. An explorer at heart, he looked at the strange constructions with interest.
An elf crewman hurried up to Tyfelian and Kiran.
"Tyfelian, Kiran?" he called.
"Yes, Lyreth?" Kiran replied as Tyfelian also looked at him.
"This place looks a lot like Tovag Baragu on Oerth, except for those cone-shaped objects," the elf pointed out.
"Tovag Baragu?"
"A site in the Dry Steppes... where, supposedly, one can see other places, and the past or future."
"Remarkable," Kiran murmured, looking at the arches and columns. A light wind went through the ruins constantly, noticeable now that the crew stood more or less in the open, and it made a soft, mournful sound. The area not only looked but also felt old, immensely old.
"Barol?" Tyfelian hissed.
"Yeah?" the dwarf called back from some distance away, where he was examining a column.
"How could one get those crossbeam stones up there to form an arch?"
"Magic's the only way. Oh, I suppose ya could carve all this out o' a little hill, but that'd take half o' forever, even for dwarves." He glanced up at the slab of rock resting on two others. "Don't know why anyone'd make somethin' like this anyway, but I ain't no wizard."
Barolcot stomped off across the stone.
Kiran kept pace with him. "How old is this place?"
Barolcot stopped and eyed the stones.
He grunted, then pointed at a column.
"That there's solid granite, for sure... it's been here for many a' year." He vaguely traced different heights of the column with his finger. "It's eroded, but ya can tell it was polished once upon a time. By the gods... wild guess, thirty thousand years, kid."
Barolcot shook his head and walked away again, following Tyfelian.
Kiran frowned. This shared illusion was very good but not perfect. Someone calling him a "kid" did not offend him, but such a choice of words was not Barolcot's style. The engineer was older than Kiran only chronologically; adjusting for the longer life span of dwarves, Barolcot was considerably younger than the paladin.
He glanced at Trula, who walked near him. She, too, had heard it, and noticed the discrepancy. She giggled.
"The magic might be showin' him up as a crusty old dwarf," she said to him softly. "Showin' him up as most people think dwarves act like."
Kiran nodded thoughtfully.
Presently they came to the center of the area, at the mushroom-shaped formation. Though taller, it had been hard to see from any distance; they could tell that the builders had placed the other structures with just that in mind.
Alzja, Jalaysa, and Tash moved right up to the object to examine it. They noted the strange runes upon it, and they shared a long look with Kiran. The Octahedron, still in his hand, was covered with runes that looked more than a little similar. The resemblance was impossible to miss.
"Hsst!" Tyfelian squelched them very softly. "Play along, play along!" he signed to them frantically. "We need to find out what happened... we can go back to this place in real life at a better time to study. When we first found this, we would have examined it to find out what it is."
Kiran nodded and put the Octahedron away into a belt pouch. Tash looked disappointed, Alzja frustrated, but they went back to the charade, studying the runes on the alien construct as if they had no other examples.
Presently Alzja pulled out a sheet of papyrus and put it down on the ground, after sweeping most of the dust from a spot. She wrote down some symbols from memory, made some notes, then went back to Tash and talked to her for a few moments.
Alzja's fine fingers rolled the papyrus back up and she tucked it into a pouch on her belt. She exchanged a tentative smile with Tash and stepped over to Tyfelian and Kiran.
"We think this device is a portal to other places. A lot of the symbols on it relate to long-distance traveling," Tash advised them. "But it has nothing to do with time travel, like Tovag Baragu might, if that story is true," she added, inclining her head to Lyreth.
"Dimension doors?" Tyfelian asked.
"Something like that," Tash explained, "but the applications described here start with magic a bit more powerful than dimension doors."
"Such as?" Tyfelian prodded.
"Try a dimension door that can take you to another crystal shell with a single step," Alzja put in. "Like the Elendrans' spansphere portals. I can't believe it... I'd find it hard to believe that this thing still works... or ever did work, actually."
Tyfelian thought.
"I know only the most powerful spells can let you do that... but to actually hold it steady, and go to different places..."
"I doubt that even the Mercane could do such a thing," Alzja scoffed. "Still, we can try to activate it, if you want."
Tyfelian nodded once.
Tash moved to the artifact. She pressed a hand against it and muttered words of magic, reading the runes and inscriptions on the "stalk" of the "mushroom" laboriously.
To everyone's surprise, the artifact began to make a humming sound. Tash backed away from it hurriedly.
"All hands move away!" Kiran yelled.
"Take cover!" added Tash.
The fifty of them scrambled behind columns and piles of debris. Nearly all of them peeked around to watch, though.
The lower side of the "mushroom cap" began to glow, faded, and then began to flicker. Magical power surged through the cap, but it seemed weak and sluggish.
"What's it doing?" Tyfelian asked Tash or Alzja.
"Maybe nothing," Tash replied. "Perhaps all these thousands of years were too long—"
Tash's words died as the some of the runes on the "stalk" flared into light, and the lower side of the cap blazed into brilliant, sparkling golden light. The humming sound grew louder, and seemed to reverberate—or perhaps to be answered in kind—from the arches throughout the ruins.
The light from the cap burst into a whirling column of brilliance, which snapped down to the ground. Only the cap remained visible; the stalk had vanished into a column of golden light the same diameter as the cap and extending down from it.
The arches now hummed on their own for certain, and the inside of each became limned with the sparkling golden light. For a few seconds, as the outlines of radiance appeared, each archway was filled with a sheet of the light, but then it cleared and only the sparkles remained.
"I can't believe it!" Alzja cried. "I didn't believe it could be done... but it was... and the thing still works!"
Tash came up from her crouch slowly and walked over to the nearest arch. She bit her lip in anticipation, glanced at Alzja, and spoke to the arch.
"Hearthspace, Shipyard Station Quatha Vellar."
The sparkles flashed, then vanished, and within the arch, they beheld a view of Quatha Vellar. The view revealed the floating shipyard edge-on; behind it, they could easily see Clyperri, the colorful ice moon that the old shipyard station orbited.
Tash smiled, delighted, but then her expression went grim.
"This is the most ancient magic I've ever seen... the Elendran drow mastered this kind of magic in modern times," she signed at the other five who carried the Elendran artifacts. "Thusly, it seems, they created the spansphere portals that got them to Listraeespace."
"Speaking of the Elendrans, they should show up any time now," Tyfelian signed back. "Get ready, but try to act as you would have the first time."
"Is this a passage? Could we get to Quatha by stepping through there?" he asked aloud.
"Oh, yes," Tash and Alzja replied, almost in chorus.
"You'd have to move the exact view—if it will change—a bit before you went, though," Tash went on. "As it is now, you'd step into open space near Quatha Vellar, but not on it."
"But we mustn't," Jaclyn pointed out. "The Elnamerrna's still here. We'd have to shrink her and bring her through in the deadbox."
"And beside that, this is only dream, still," she reminded them in clumsy drow sign.
"True enough," Tyfelian admitted quietly. He eyed the arch curiously.
"Why's it controlled by voice?"
Alzja giggled.
"Wouldn't be much o' a portal if you had to cast a spell every time you used it," she commented, but Tyfelian knew that that was only a guess.
"How can it hear us?"
Tash smiled, and when she spoke, her soft voice held a tone similar to that which she might use on her apprentice.
"Contingency spells," she answered him. "The same way a wand hears you when you speak its command word."
Tyfelian's eyebrows flickered and he shook his head slightly, body language for 'if you say so'."
"All hands," he called out, "divvy up into groups and experiment with telling these arches to look at different places. But, for your lives, do not step through, no matter what you see."
"All hands," Tash called. This was a surprise; though any crewman could in theory ask for the entire crew's attention, only Tyfelian and Kiran had ever done so. For the slightly shy Tash to do it meant something important, most certainly.
"Try to avoid looking in on places where you might see someone who can feel scrying. They might know they're being watched, and there are ways they might find out who and where you are."
The crew moved off after Tash's warning. They gathered in unequal groups around the arches—there were twenty-one total, but it seemed that only nine still operated—and they started issuing commands in rotation.
Tyfelian skipped over to an arch where several crewmen from the same world—Oerth—had gathered. He watched as they looked in on different places.
He paused them with a comment as they viewed a pair of deserts separated by a mountain range. The southern desert looked completely enclosed by mountains and extremely inhospitable; Tyfelian eyed that one as he spoke.
"Those places look pretty rough—what are they called?"
"The Dry Steppes and the Sea of Dust," Lyreth answered immediately. "They were reduced to deserts by the Twin Cataclysms."
Tyfelian looked at the regions sadly. He had heard the legends, but he had not recognized the places by sight; he had never actually been to Greyspace or Oerth. He had picked up his Oerthian crewmen at other places.
Kiran moved up beside them, curious as to what might be so interesting. He watched as the Oerth natives moved the view here and there by turns.
What he saw did not look very cheery.
When the crewmen got finished, Tyfelian glanced at Kiran and asked, "What do you think?"
"All of our Oerthian crewmen are from a part of that world called 'the Flanaess," Kiran replied. "I've got a good idea of current conditions there. Kind-of like an overview that might take months of listening to rumors and sorting out the truth... for someone actually there. Seems like a major war is brewing. It might erupt very, very soon—even next spring, by their seasons."
The paladin shook his head grimly as Tyfelian bowed his head.
"It's tempting to walk through this thing... find out who's who from Lyreth... and help the Good nations win," he commented.
"Yes, but there's nothing we could do if we tried...this still only dream," Kiran reminded, discreetly switching to drow sign in mid-sentence. "And besides, the Greyspace gods might not like it..." he trailed off to cover his silent message.
Tyfelian swallowed a smile at the humans' ability to perform drow sign language—pathetic at best—but he kept his comments to himself. Few people other than the drow themselves could perform the silent language with any competence.
As the half-drow and the human walked away, the crewmen reset the view in the arch to that of the whole planet—they didn't know how to shut the arch off completely. They didn't get far before they found Fing hanging back, fidgeting uncomfortably—an odd sight when a kender was the one fidgeting.
"Something?" Kiran asked her.
"I'd love to look in on my home town, but all of the arches are being used," Fing told him.
"Not this one—yet. They're just finished," Kiran advised her, inclining his head toward the one that showed Oerth.
Fing moved toward it. Kiran fell into step beside her, and as they approached it, he asked, "What's the name of your old home?"
"Kendermore."
"What continent?"
After a moment to think and remember, Fing replied, "Ansalon."
"Krynnspace, Krynn, continent of Ansalon, Kendermore," the human told the arch.
The view immediately shifted to the place named. Kiran watched happily as Fing looked in on her birthplace. His mood changed to one of amusement as he saw an entire town filled with kenders.
"An interesting place to say the least," Kiran thought. "I'm sure no one would ever leave with anything they'd been carrying when they arrived," he realized, smiling.
He watched with a chuckle as a kender town guard chased off some rats from the door to an inn while another kender "borrowed" his billy club.
Kiran had always liked that about Fing; she was almost always good for a laugh, in addition to her clerical powers. Obviously, she wasn't unique in that way among her own kind.
Tyfelian came up, and likewise felt some warmth flow into his heart from the sights of Kendermore. He watched several amusing scenes of kenders running and playing, then asked Fing, "Home?"
Fing gave him a warm smile by way of answer, instead of the usual lovesick gaze she often locked upon him. "I haven't been back for a long time."
For once, the half-drow understood something from the kender—an event that made him wonder whether he might need to sit down for a moment, but he did understand. He sometimes felt a very faint twinge of homesickness for Embimura, his adopted home country back on Erilonia.
He opened his mouth to comment further, but a sudden hue and cry from another arch stopped him.
"Change the view! Change it! Now!" Tash was yelling.
Tyfelian and Kiran hurried over to the spot. They immediately saw that Jalaysa had changed the view to see, not another crystal shell, but another plane of existence—the Abyss, Tyfelian guessed, for he had been there once.
He had never actually met one, but he knew an Abyssal Lord by sight. This one was sitting on a horrible throne made from tortured creatures, and looking around angrily, trying to discern who was scrying on him.
Jalaysa was frantically concentrating on the view to change it, but it was too late. The Abyssal Lord roared and sprang up from his throne. His arm shot through the portal and into the Material Plane. The unfortunate Jalaysa got clawed from chin to belly with filthy, razor-sharp fingernails. Those nails belonged to a hand that looked human, except for an orange highlight on the skin.
Terrified, Jalaysa leaped up and kicked the arm back into the portal. Fing was there, and she concentrated on the portal and spoke to it, to change its view to Kendermore.
Evidently, though, two portals from the strange artifact could not open to exactly the same place. The view through the arch flickered on Kendermore, but then moved to a brighter, more sandy area, presumably one of Krynn's deserts.
Fing studied the view for a moment, and then softly said, "Khur," as she spotted the mountains in the background.
"Why did you look upon the Abyss, Jalaysa?" Kiran scolded the elf lady.
"I didn't do it purposely," she responded. "I wanted to look at Leafloft Forest, but instead, it looked... there."
"Bad arch?" Kiran suggested.
"It's very old... its magic might be slipping," Tash said. "Your run-of-the-mill magical device, if there is such a thing, might start getting unstable after a thousand years."
"Tash, Alzja—shut it down," Tyfelian commanded. An out-of-control planar travel device seemed the last thing they needed.
He noted some of the crew—most of the gunners, a few of the sailing crew—rush up to surround the offending arch with drawn weapons.
Tyfelian tensed. The gunners!
Of course.
"What place is that?" exclaimed a gunner, Anna by name, Tyfelian remembered—an impostor had replaced her. Not a good thing—Anna was the senior gunner of all, the first of the new, permanent crew to sign on, except for those few of the mercenary crew who had decided to stay.
It explained much—though Kiran wrote the Elnamerrna's duty schedules, Anna was in charge of any spur-of-the-moment changes, and these were not routinely reported to the First Officer. Anna's impostor had had the ability to make sure that the impostors spent little time with the real crew. Further to the spies' good fortune, it had been only eight days after they had awakened that they had found Listraeespace. An ideal turn of events for the spies—not long enough to blow their covers, but long enough to suffer Kiran's drills and thereby learn a lot about how Tyfelian's crew behaved in battle.
"Krynn, the Khur Desert," Fing said, answering Anna, as Alzja and Tash left them. "It's near Kendermore."
Then kender seemed about to continue, but as the two wizards moved toward the mushroom-like object, everything went pitch black under magical darkness.
Tyfelian and the other five real persons, hardly surprised by the typical drow opening attack, turned and ran out of the darkness. Tyfelian, however, crashed right into the arms of two people. In the total darkness, he could not see who, but he felt certain they weren't Elnamerrna crew. Only a moment before, no one had been in the line of flight he had taken.
The two drow spies tried to lift Tyfelian up by his armpits. They then started to drag him toward the arch, even though they had been only partially successful.
Tyfelian backpedaled, stood, and arced his fists out to either side just as they got him there and tried to throw him through the arch. His clenched hands unerringly and unmercifully belted the Elendrans on their temples and they lost their grips.
Kiran darted out of the darkness, sword drawn. He saw two Elendrans immediately and ran to attack them. However, they each cast a spell upon him and one of them slipped through Kiran's powerful force of will.
He stopped, paralyzed, in midstride. From his unfortunate situation, he could only watch in horror as the Elendrans attacked the Red Hurwaeti, the six odd hurwaeti who served the Silver Triop.
Alzja and Tash cast dimension door spells to get out of the darkness. They each arrived on the far side of the mushroom object, but there were four enemies standing right there.
The Elendrans overpowered them in moments.
Lygalliz, one of the Red Hurwaeti, leaped right over the heads of three Elendrans in the darkness. He ended up just at the edge of the spell's radius. From there, he turned right around and hurled daggers into two backs.
The third Elendran came to the edge of the darkness globe near Lygalliz and raised a hand crossbow. He fired blindly at the hurwaet, but Lygalliz jumped aside and threw two more daggers. His aim was only slightly off, and one of the blades glanced off the Elendran's elbow, causing pain but no real damage. Lygalliz—and Kiran, watching helplessly a short distance away—know that the dagger had clipped the target from the suppressed yelp that came out of the darkness globe.
The Elendrans attacking Lygalliz and the five other hurwaeti got frustrated with trying to shoot these leaping Elnamerrna crewmen and instead charged to grapple.
The one fighting Lygalliz took a heavy punch in the eye, but he got a grip on the hurwaet anyway.
Lygalliz drew his saber and rammed it into the Elendran's leg as they reached the edge of the darkness. The drow screamed but swung his sword right back in at the hurwaet. Its hilt came for Lygalliz's head. He moved away and avoided having his skull crushed, but he still took a solid hit on the jaw.
Lygalliz fought them frantically, kicking, biting, punching and squirming. He could not see the other five hurwaeti, but that only made him more desperate. It took four Elendrans to pin him on the ground.
Kiran hoped that the portrayal of the past was accurate on that point. He liked the way that the Red Hurwaeti went after the Elendrans with gusto, even overmatched.
Tyfelian ran out of the darkness just as the globes expired. He watched helplessly as some of the Elendrans used telekinesis spells and hurled twenty of his crew—the gunners, mostly, all either knocked unconscious or magically paralyzed—into the unstable archway. Others had overcome their originals and now threw them into the arch by main strength. Unable to resist, they tumbled away across the unforgiving sands of the Khur desert on Krynn.
The sight was strange. The Elendrans now looked exactly like the twenty crewmen that they had just tossed onto another world.
He noted the fates of his fellow artifact bearers and ignored them for the moment. He watched the Elendrans and the surrounding area closely.
By getting the jump on the Elnamerrna crew, they had disposed of his real gunners and had taken their places with perfect disguises. As to acting like the real persons, that was no problem, unknown to the Elendrans. He didn't yet know the new crewmen well enough to notice any discrepancies.
However, the Elendrans did not have the power to erase two weeks' worth of memories. Memories of this immediate event, sure—they must have had that in mind—but not two weeks. Someone else had to be involved.
Tyfelian returned his attention to his real comrades as one of the Elendrans—"Autumn"—concentrated on the arch. The image of the twenty replaced crewmen, and Khur, vanished as she said, "Elendraspace, Elendra'veldrin, House Royal Elandra'la'vantric."
The place "Autumn" specified may have been her intent, but it certainly wasn't the result. The view snapped right back to the Abyssal Lord's throne room. This time, that tanar'ri was ready for it and leaped through the portal onto the dead moon in the Prime Material Plane.
Tyfelian marveled at the Abyssal Lord despite his revulsion for the evil thing. He looked much like the yuan-ti abominations that the half-drow had known and fought on Erilonia—a vaguely humanoid snake, somewhat resembling a king cobra with arms—but this demon prince had legs that appeared humanoid, though with scales, and he was overall a deep red color. His hands looked human, aside from the fact that they were orange. Twice the height of a man, he towered over everyone, even Kreg.
Tyfelian frowned as he noticed something else. There was something familiar about the creature's eyes, which looked more human than the rest of him. He felt sure that he had seen those eyes before, somewhere, but he could not pin down the memory.
The creature looked around, gave the Elendrans a nod, smiled horribly, and then moved over to the mushroom object to examine it. He ran his nearly human hands over its gold-glowing column of energy with a chuckle, then reached through the column to seize the artifact.
"Forget... forget... this never happened... things just are... and you're gone on your way," the fiend intoned. The mushroom artifact flared, and Tyfelian lost all control of his movements.
The fiend, with the mushroom's help, force-marched all of them, including the drow impostors, to the Elnamerrna. The Elendran impostors wore looks of surprise, but then they relaxed as they figured out what the Abyssal Lord had in mind. A couple of them looked miffed, but it would work to their advantage. They obviously had no idea why an Abyssal Lord not allied with the Spider Queen would deign to help them, but they did not question good fortune.
Tyfelian saw the view in the failing archway as he passed. It flickered uncontrollably from the Krynnish Khur desert to the tanar'ri's throne chamber.
The half-drow saw his missing crewmen through the arch when it looked upon Khur, and now understood why he had not attempted to rescue them. At the time, he had not been able to try; later on, he had not remembered any of this. The search for impostors and stowaways that he had ordered had been naught but common sense, perhaps enhanced by the Dridercomp.
When they reached and entered the Elnamerrna, the fiend forced them to ready her for launch. Tyfelian felt that horrible mental blast that he remembered all too well, or a suggestion of it from the illusion, and he knew that his memories of all this had faded very rapidly at this point. He now knew what the ghastly sensation had been. That was what it felt like to have a portion of one's memories erased by force—and by way of telepathic manipulation that was not very subtle.
This time, he would remember all of it, when he again stood in the ruins of Nauthe'hressishtel.
As the Elnamerrna rose from the dead moon and made way for the crystal shell wall, the fiend's control began to ebb. Tyfelian attempted to climb out of the starboard catapult bay and onto the outside of the ship to make a note to himself about all this, but "Autumn" used another telekinesis spell on a yardarm to swing it over at him.
It struck his head and knocked him senseless. By the time he recovered, he noted that the Elendran spies had started to tie off all the sails on full and rigged them to fly the Silver Triop with the flow winds on as straight a course as possible. He crawled away from them, knowing that their memories of the events would be fading, too, and made it back to the bridge to collapse in front of the outeye.
The first time, their identities had faded from his mind quickly. Who had rigged the sails? He could not place the faces or the names...
... but he had known, as the Elnamerrna reached the crystal shell wall and returned to the Rainbow Ocean, that twenty crew members had made him very, very nervous for a reason he could not remember...
Nauthe'hressishtel, ruins of the Temple of Eelistraee
Elnamerrna command crew
Greenmonth 27th, 2461
Tyfelian swayed as the real world came back into focus around him. He grabbed the jamb of the hidden door to support him, and blinked hard to make his eyes his own again.
"Tyfelian?" Sildara called, shaking him lightly.
"Hm?"
"You went into a trance and wouldn't respond to anything..." Sildara explained uncertainly.
Tyfelian shook his head to clear it. He willed the memories to come back, and they did, but Sildara was still with him.
"How long were we like this?"
Sildara shrugged slightly. "Only ten, fifteen seconds."
Tyfelian fell silent for a moment. All those memories re-lived in just seconds...
He had to clear his throat to speak again.
"We re-lived the visit to that rogue crystal shell I mentioned," he stated, gasping slightly. "I know how our crewmen got replaced by spies now."
Tash's eyes widened and she coughed. "But they weren't killed—they..."
The half-drow realized it even as she stammered the words. Horror filled his heart; almost as intense as what he had felt when Nauthe'hressishtel had been destroyed.
"Oh... shit..." Tyfelian mumbled as he covered his face with his hands.
