Planar Disturbances Story Preview & News

Zeventrech lowered himself down the last part of the cliff face, and stood on the thin strip of sandy beach. The ocean reached far to the horizon, sighing along with him. Lenet, his Jakei escort, and Korin had stayed in the outskirts of Ironfist to handle the new Valdeci problem, so Zeventrech was alone. He was used to it. The great Sea of Separation spread out before him, and Zeventrech was struck with a rare sense of nostalgia, for the land that he knew lay somewhere out there, beyond sight, which had once been half his home. Long dead... long dead. He turned down to the water at his feet. As expected, there was wreckage in the surf. He had heard reports in J’Thir, passed on up from the Forglar coast, concerned, but uncertain, idle reports. Here it was, though, along the Peaks coast as well, were Zeventrech had worried it would be. With slow, laborious breathes Zeventrech dropped to one knee. He prodded a small piece of metal -- shipping hull of some kind -- with his staff, and then picked it up. It now made sense why the Salaman investigators were confused. If Gekaal had seen it, there was a chance he would have recognized it, but even that was unlikely. The metal shard hummed deeply with nora, but it was an empty hum, like the sound an instrument makes when touched by a buzzing tuning fork. The nora in the wreckage was inherited and accidental. Zeventrech had never before encountered this kind of resonance. But he had heard of it. This nora pattern also bore a striking similarity to that which had destroyed the old Empire: the nora of the Separation. But what did it mean for these shards to wash up on Pox’s southern shores? “It couldn’t be another Separation.” Zeventrech muttered. “The traces appeared after the fact. We had no warning.” Zeventrech was about to look at the fragment itself, when he heard growling off to the left. With some effort, he stood up, and held his staff at the ready. Zeventrech wasn’t eager for a fight at the best of times, but was a willing and able sorcerer when the need arose. Recently, however, with the Arroyo breaking through and this new disturbance in the nora weave, he was leery of casting any magic at all. Had his personal inspection of the shoreline wreckage not demanded speed, he would have even forgone his teleportation spell. This handicap on his mind, Zeventrech squinted along the surf. A pack of four beasts, wolflike and on all fours, loped along the water’s edge, alternately smelling nora exuding from the detritus, and eating carrion that had washed in. Spotting the cyclops, they eyed