Pool of Radiance_ Ruins of Myth Drannor - Carrie Bebris [11]
Now many of the bridges were destroyed, and the buildings below looked like an earthquake had violently shaken them. Broken spires lay in fragments on the ground, their jagged stumps rising no higher toward the stars than did human constructions. Collapsed walls exposed the rooms they had been meant to protect, inviting creatures mundane and malicious to make their homes within. Statues of exquisite elven maidens lacked limbs or heads and stood watch over dry fountains choked with moss and debris. Weeds and thorns overtook the gardens. Rubble littered the streets.
A feeling of sadness, unfamiliar but genuine, washed over Kestrel. Something more than a city had been lost here.
At last she approached the others.
“You certainly took your time coming over,” Corran said. He gestured toward the adventurers. “They’re all dead-if you care.”
“Good thing we almost killed ourselves getting here, then,” she responded. “You had no right to force me into that portal.”
“You would stand idly by while others suffered?”
“This isn’t my problem.”
“You did volunteer,” Durwyn piped up.
Was he ganging up on her too, now? She fixed him with a withering gaze that caused the burly man to step back a pace. “My commitment began and ended in Phlan,” she said.
Corran shook his head in disgust. “Don’t you have the least concern for anyone besides yourself?”
“I saved your arse in that damn gate, didn’t I?”
“Enough!” Ghleanna, her expression strained, stepped between them. “Corran, she’s right-you shouldn’t have forced her to come. Kestrel, now that we are here, can we at least search for clues to what happened?”
“Sure,” Kestrel responded, her gaze remaining locked on Corran. She’d settle this later.
The adventurers appeared to have been dead for hours. Ghleanna hypothesized that time had become distorted in the malfunctioning gate, suspending the travelers in limbo much longer than the few seconds usually required to journey through one. The party also looked to have suffered wounds the orcs could not have inflicted.
“I believe their opponents wielded magic,” Ghleanna said. “Look at those deep burns on Allyril, the party’s sorceress. Ordinary fire doesn’t burn skin quite that way-I suspect lightning bolts. The cleric over there seems to have had the life drained right out of him, as does Loren. Athan is missing. I-I fear he was disintegrated altogether.” She cleared her throat and looked away.
Corran uttered the opening words of a prayer for the ill-fated band’s souls. Kestrel, never one to take much interest in religious observances, rolled her eyes but remained silent during the invocation. As she waited, paying little attention to the words, she noticed a smooth rectangular bulge under the cloak of the man Ghleanna had called Loren. When the paladin finished his prayer, she bent over the body to investigate.
“Have you no respect?” Corran hissed.
“What? I thought you were done.”
“You would steal from the corpses of fallen comrades?”
She clenched her jaw, fresh ire rising within her. If Ghleanna or Durwyn had reached for that object, he wouldn’t have said a word. “I thought we were investigating what happened here.” Pointedly turning her back on him, she unclasped Loren’s cloak, slipped her hand into its inside pocket, and withdrew a slim book. She opened its leaves, quickly skimming the pages. “It’s a journal.”
Corran reached for it. “Let me see.”
Kestrel snatched the volume out of his grasp. “I can read.” She flipped to the end, hoping the last few entries would prove the most informative.
Elminster was right, the last page read. A new Pool of Radiance exists somewhere in Myth Drannor. The pool’s creators know our mission and already send agents to stop us, even