WWW #45: Nothing

This is the sound of Worlds Beyond Number.

Sputtering lamp overlooking pages spread across a tattered, thin blanket on the dirt dirt floor of a smuggler's cave reveals the work of a long night

spent in exhaustion, tapped from a day of heavy casting.

The wizard sky, Suvarin Kedbariket, is once again sleepless, focused, and bent on achieving great workings of magic.

Suvi, throughout the course of the night, as the other shape changers have slept, of which I'll remind you there are about 13

within the chamber here, including Yorin.

Yorin and a dozen others.

You have poured over the seized spell books, partially damaged in the water, but with enough remaining for you to transcribe into your own spell book with

tasks, wonderful assistance.

Your ink demons, as helpful as they are, leave some things to be desired, but a spider made of mirrors who is very friendly and seems to love you a whole lot, who can record images and project text and like literally take calligraphy and transpose it for you to trace onto your own pages is

kind of an exponential magnitude of helpfulness added to your working screen.

And Task loves the task set before him.

Oh, set before them, him, it, a spider?

I default to him for a little guy.

He's a little guy.

He's a little guy.

In

transposing this text, you have managed to record

a handful of spells.

Two of them immediately under your mastery.

You're familiar with them.

You may even have them ready for your copying and study back at the Tower of the Glove.

One of which is a spell that allows you to see hidden creatures, creatures such as Ursulan, who can vanish from sight, or wizards who can vanish from sight, such as yourself.

And diving into the spell even further, you realize that it is very much a spell from a divinatory school, but also very much rooted in the near spirit.

It's allowing you to see things that are present somewhere.

And you realize that when creatures hide, much like hiding physically,

your form still has to be somewhere.

So maybe you're not visible because you're in the near spirit or you're otherwise nearby.

You also have managed to transcribe in your long night here

some spells that we have seen in the previous episode.

We picked them on purpose.

Well, it seems this guild has a sort of series of spells that are dirigur, right?

That there is a

what?

It's diriguel.

Dirigur.

Diriguel.

Dirigur.

Out of strictness, according to strict etiquette, so like mandated by the glass coronet, that one of them is the spell that we saw cast on Ursulan that produces bolts of fire that are sort of

more powerful than the Arulean bolts, but require, as a result of their power, require more careful aim.

They do not automatically strike your target.

And you also find a version of the spell that you saw sworn cast in Abyssin, a truly explosive blast of flame.

You managed to break past your normal capabilities to transcribe and,

in a sense, not prepare, but pre-prepare the casting of that spell because you are

literally...

do not have the training to call upon energy that potent yet.

As advanced as you are within the hierarchy of the citadel, you got your name cloak earlier this year.

Normally you get a second to master some of this stuff.

And you did have to spend like two years getting soft cookies for silence, which slowed you down a little bit.

You are halfway through the spell that you recognize as the foundation of zero,

Reactive counter magic.

When the shape changers around you begin to stir,

it is at this moment coming out of deep study that you see them begin to get up.

And you see a couple of them walking over and speaking to Yorin

in Gauth off in a corner of the room.

She still has observant and she speaks Gauth.

What are they talking about?

You.

You see that the two of the shape changers are looking over at Yorin.

It's a very simple conversation.

You see that one of them, who is a

kind of like

a sheenless platinum blonde.

So not shiny or well-kept, but kind of like paper blonde, long tresses of hair.

You see there's a woman here who is wearing just some dirty slacks and a vest.

Looks a little bit gaunt, and you can see stays in a position of some transformation.

It's not like she's got, it's not like she's all the way at Grimoire's level of having talons, but you can just see some pronounced fangs, and her eyes stay a little bit reflective.

It looks like she sort of permanently shifted her eyes into kind of a bestial

form.

You see her speaking to Yorin and going,

Pretty incredible.

Kid of your former allies at the Citadel shows up in the cave.

If I was gonna pick someone to and you see that Jorin goes

If this was a plan

Those soldiers arrived chasing her

to Reedport so the uh this was a Opportunity.

How would they have set this up to know and you see that she shrugs and says they know we're here and he goes

This is the empire if they knew we were here.

They would have killed us They're not what's the plan to lure us to know where we are and lure us to somewhere else to kill us there?

And you see, so you just see it's a conversation about determining whether this insane coincidence is too good to be true.

Yeah, I think at some point in the lull,

Suvi,

yeah,

she's like mid-working on Counterspell, but like, I think there's a lot of thinking about Zero and Abisin.

That's she can feel her mind like wandering away from that, and she's also very tired.

It's been like 30-something hours since she slept.

And we'll just look up and say, in gauth, like to the conversation,

I would have just reported you all in the middle of the night if I was an agent.

So you probably shouldn't have gone to sleep around me.

But I didn't, and I'm fine.

Yorin looks out of the other shape changers.

Laana,

you want to know my proof?

And she turns around and says, what's your proof?

And he says, got a good feeling.

It's never led me astray before.

When you're facing an enemy that

relies on

information

and wields information,

basing your decisions on information plays you to the enemy's hands.

When I play from the gut, I stay one step ahead

something about that hits in exactly

the way that makes suvy think immediately of ursulan and ame especially ursalon and how much his instincts in moments have been exactly borne out the scar like the scarf that she got from

Neif in the castle and his like instinctual understanding to go and free Naram exactly when he did.

Yeah.

And she just kind of gets a faraway look and nods, even though that hurts as a person who loves information.

There's a real like DW from Arthur being like, This sign can't stop me.

I can't read.

Of Yorin being like, oh, a clever trap of information and the manipulation of data from the Citadel.

Well, I don't pay attention to this in any context.

You see, he goes,

You've been up all night?

Is it not night?

Look around at the cave that's underwater.

It's about to be morning, and I'd say Imperial troops spent yesterday marching.

They're probably

when sun rises and they start marching again.

If they make good time,

they'll make it to Reedport by

tonight.

Okay.

Well, probably should have slept.

No regrets.

I'm fine.

I'm great, actually.

I feel great.

I feel so good.

So, we should go.

We should go.

Hold on, hold on.

Hold on.

And Sevi gets up and walks over to

the blood sigil that she was using to cast all the identify stuff last night.

Okay, okay.

People that like information, you leave them things for that.

The ring is a snitch.

And Sevi's gonna take off her father's ring.

If someone was tracking the ring, they could follow it here and they will see it's a smuggler's den and it might look for enough time to buy time.

Like I was killed down here and we don't need to be tracked by that.

Takes off the ring.

You have to put things away.

And I think there's something across the night of like this careful study and that realization that magic is so much bigger than the things that she was taught.

And even for a couple hours, just a day ago,

where she was a celebrated war hero.

She was thanked personally by a prince of the Seura's Empire.

And she's never going to go back to that.

There's no way back to that because she knows too much now.

And I think she just starts to put

the version of her that is a wizard of the citadel so specifically away.

And then she kind of gets to the part where she thinks about silver.

And she doesn't want to put that part away yet.

So she's going to tuck a thing that she loves into something else that she loves, which is her magic.

Especially all the glass things that are coated so strongly to the tower and the empire and the citadel.

And she remembers that the word for electroplating, a little bit of metal on the back of glass to turn it into a mirror, is called silvering.

So she's going to silver all of her magic that is so glass coated.

The shards of her magic missile and her mage armor and her shatter.

and all that happens as she holds her glass staff

and it goes over to mirror too

and it's just a little too bright and a little too much

and I think

as she looks at it and appreciates that because now she feels more in community with little task the mirror spider She feels like her magic is something more personal now.

But she can't walk around as a wizard of the citadel anymore.

And she's gonna look over at

Lahana.

And not with like any like, there's a thing to prove, but she wants her to see it and anyone else to see it.

I'm going to

shatter the glass staff on the ground.

Shattering the the staff in front of you, you see the other shape changers behold this act.

Their reactions are their own.

Most of them are silent.

They've been living for weeks in a strange land, knowing only explosive violence and utmost secrecy.

And I think you see, too,

that even in their homeland, they are rebels.

And there is an understanding that is not turned to you in warmth,

but an understanding of what it means to break a glass staff and what it means to turn away from the broad road.

CV wipes the dust

of her shattered staff, once glass, now mirror, from her hand and looks down at the ground at the pile of it

and steps on it more and reduces it from those like chunks of broken crystal

and grinds it back into fine white sand.

She scoops it up and pours it into an empty vial and takes it with her.

We should go.

Do you think you'll

If you ever return to the citadel,

odds are it'll be in chains.

But

I should tell you before we head out,

did you ever make it back to your parents' apartment?

Not in Malakanth.

They had a place on Caterwall Lane.

in Haverward.

Small building not too far from the night market, but

when the Academy was at its height

and they needed to be on mission overseas, but remain at the Citadel in secret, they wouldn't stay in their home.

They stayed

in Caterwall Lane.

Thank you.

I didn't know that.

I, you know, it'll be.

I don't want to be crass.

It's your parents.

but you know, they haven't paid rent in over a decade.

So

I assume it's been picked clean, but you know.

Look, I didn't know their names until like a month ago, so

you know, you know their names,

yeah.

Amand and Chandre

That does feel better.

I think at that, Suvi's Suvi's just going to go over and hug him.

No one else gets how much that hurts.

He gives you a big

bear hug.

And as he does, he goes,

Wizard, wizard!

He goes,

And you see, he

puts, moves his hand from your shoulder to the back of your head and kind of like, he's...

almost in that avuncular way of like

comforting someone.

And you see that he quickly moves from the place of whatever he was feeling to, like, oh, the kid.

And, like,

gives you that comfort.

And as he does,

he

goes,

if you ever make it back there, there's probably someone else living there.

But they, you know,

it was a spy's apartment, so maybe kick a floorboard and something will pop up.

I don't know.

Okay.

And you see that he gives you a kiss on the cheek and whispers something in your ear in a language you don't understand.

And you feel that the sides of your neck get hot, hot, hot.

And you feel something split twice on each side of your neck.

And he says, all right, let's go.

Fuck.

As girls grow on the side of your neck,

he's like, all right, oh yeah, you got to get in the water right now.

I can't do.

I flip him off.

I can't do air and water.

It's one or the other.

Just grabs her shit and like flops into the water.

Move out.

Deep water report.

And you see that the shape changers hit the water.

He leaps forward and as he does, he turns into a 35-foot like Megalodon shark.

What?

Oh my God.

What?

He's called Megalodon?

He's like a full, like, like 15 to 15.

He's like Jason Statham Megalodon?

He's the Don

or the Meg.

Damn it.

I really.

I do really, I appreciate the Megalodon over shark.

Like that is, I really, that was great.

Yeah, he's like about like, so a great, the biggest great white whites are like 22, 25.

He's a 35-foot.

He ain't that.

He ain't that.

He's a fucking Megalodon, baby.

You guys see me screaming in the water.

Oh, I get gills, but you're a super shark.

Okay.

And you begin to be able to speak underwater as you get down there.

And you see, he goes, They got pools at the Citadel these days.

Shut up.

And I try to grab onto him somewhere.

You grab onto a dorsal fin, immediately cut your hand on the sandpaper shark's skin.

And you see, he goes, Uh-oh, blood in the water.

Shut up, shut up.

Joke's on you.

I'm on my rag.

And then I take that.

Fanged and finned creatures of combat swim in deep, dark water down the river towards Reedport, with a guild wizard holding on for dear life as she finds her friends once more

In a pitch-black basement, the last of the fox fire flickers away from the two segments

of the moments ago united body of the wizard Keen.

Smell of blood,

smoke from the now extinguished candle,

cold air, ice blocks lining the wall as meat hangs in the cellar.

Limping over to Ame, the fox walks up and nuzzles against you.

Ursulan, you stand in the dark with your sword.

Ame, you cannot see here in the dark, but you know that Ursulan is present nearby.

I reach down for my fox.

Hey, boss.

You okay?

That

guy.

You can say it.

That

monster

almost bit my paw off.

My arm, my front leg is really hurt.

Are you okay?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He shot you in the chest with lightning.

Yeah, that was.

I was fine.

I was fine.

But I'm so sorry I sent you into danger.

I'm so sorry.

It was a trap.

And I promise that I will do my best to try and find those.

I promised you.

Mitigate harm, remember?

Yeah.

Why did that guy do that to us?

I think that that trap was a trap for us, and we were a trap for Ursulon.

Ursulan,

are you alright?

I'm fine.

You're well?

Yes.

He wanted to trap you.

I know.

I'm gonna walk over and

lay on hands, Ame.

Ame, uh, how many hit points do you have remaining?

13.

So that's what?

Out of 23.

So Ame didn't even go get bloodied by that lightning bolt.

Got it.

You go over.

Are you going to heal Ame for the full...

I'll heal Ami.

I have 20 total.

I'll hear Aame.

I'll heal Ame for 15.

Ame only needs to be healed for 10.

Oh, 10, great.

Yeah.

10 for 10.

So you heal Ame for 10 hit points, and I think that you feel

that lightning bolt that Keen

used

was a more effective one than the ones you saw silver using in combat it it uh that would

instantly kill almost anyone that it touched uh and Aame

grounded it into the earth reflexively and I think that you can

with that lay on hands

Aame is a young witch

given a hundred years, she will be as otherworldly as those women you saw in that conclave.

And the beginnings of that are here.

Ame can take a wizard's lightning bolt to the chest and remain unmoved because she is tapped into something old and powerful.

And this is a, in, in lots of vulgar instances of the supernatural, flashy magic, flying demons, talking foxes, you see a hint of a deep power within Aame

that is unseen in this moment, but sensed to you.

She wielded a strength here to survive the unsurvivable because she is more than

she is both truly mortal and more than mortal at the same time.

I'm sorry.

Thank you for coming to get me,

But I almost wish you hadn't.

It was my fault.

I promise that I'll...

I'll be better at finding traps

and about protecting my friends.

And even to...

Lord forbid, listen to Suvi's advice.

It's already clear to me that you are more than what you were earlier today.

So I believe you need not promise.

You only need to be.

I fall into his arms in a big hug.

I think Ursula takes your embrace, but does not embrace you back.

Where's Sufi?

Taken.

Taken?

Yes, she rode with the wizards back to Bracken.

What would you like to do?

We've been waylaid here long enough.

We will continue

and hope that she can find us.

We all agreed when looking at the map earlier as to where we were headed.

We should rest until just before dawn

and then make our way down the river.

Yes.

Yes, you're right.

Can you see?

Uh, no, not in the dark here.

Uh, can I find another tallow candle?

Yeah, you can.

Can you light this?

Yes.

Put it in your hands.

I light it with pressed digitation.

As you light it on top of a side of beef, the fox is perched eating into it.

He goes, Oh,

I was doing this in the dark.

I was eating...

I was eating this beef.

I think that's more than all right, Fox.

Yeah.

Gotta get that night beef.

The fox looks down and goes, whoa, these guys are dead.

Dead.

Dead, dead, dead.

Looking around

at them,

I'm just gonna kind of look around the area

at the bodies and at the floor.

Is there anything that I can

divine

about their purposes or where they were headed or what they had planned?

Yeah, give me checks and spells.

Any skill check you want to make, any spell you want to cast, go for it.

And Ursulan, same for you.

Ursulan's looking over the body of Keen

using his divine sense.

You put on your divine sense

and

you sense

quickly vanishing spirits of the dead, as this is one of the first times that you've used your divine sense immediately after parting people from life.

And you can sense the part of these wizards, which was eternal and is now no longer attached to any mortal form, quickly departing from this place.

And you sense

a nearby

demon

flickering from the edge of life.

Vandal's sort of scattered body is on the ground.

Vandal is not an organic creature, but his form has been unmade.

And he flickers in a state somewhere in limbo between making and unmaking.

Can I...

What do I know about

him?

Can I take a little handkerchief and sop him up?

Or

try to do what I normally would do to spare the dying?

Uh, give me a.

So, if it were a nature spirit, it would be different.

He is a spirit of the citadel and the arcane specifically.

I will ask for an arcana check, but I'll also allow you to do medicine, and only one of them needs to beat a 15.

So, you get two chances, girl.

Okay.

All right, uh, that's a 15

total for Arcana.

Okay, amazing.

You want to roll the medicine check to?

Just my crippled.

That's another 15 for medicine.

Hell yeah.

You look around for somebody to top him up with and immediately have the instinct.

You remember, like, you were, you're fascinated by spirits.

He is a spirit.

And in talking to Suvi back in the Citadel, you know that ink demons naturally form and constitute from the arcane ink that the Citadel wizards use to inscribe their spell books.

And you see unclaimed spell books of these dead wizards on the ground, which is, to your knowledge, that is where ink demons are born from.

Oh, okay.

So I open up one of the spell books, I crack the spine, and I flip it face down onto his ink blot to sop him up.

As you crack the spine, that act of vandalism

casts spare the dying, and

you press it down.

Does Ame say anything or do anything over the spellbook as you press it?

You feel magical potency as you put the spellbook down and can cast the Spare the Dying can trip.

What does that look like?

I put it down.

I feel warmth tingling at my fingertips on the spellbook, and I say,

Come on, you little shit wipe.

You can do it.

Come on, little buddy.

As you flip the book

over,

Vandal's ink is gone

from the ground.

And as you look in the book, you see a scattered faint web of red ink sinking into the letters and towards the cracked spine of the book.

And as the ink starts to pull towards the spine of the book, you see

two little eyes open and they're little bubbles pop in the ink.

And as it does, in a very faint voice,

I fucking love you.

I love you, do you little

poop weasel?

And you see that Vandal

sinks into an arcane torpor in the spine of the book.

You don't know.

Almost 215s, I think you would imagine that it will take some

either days at the shortest, more likely weeks, for him to like sleep in this book and like in a deep, almost like a coma, like a magical coma.

And uh, but over time,

if no one messes with this book, he will reconstitute.

May you dream of lewd sheep.

Uh, Ursulan, rifling through Keen's effect, you find a number of things.

Number one, you find his spellbook.

Number two,

you

find

two vials

sealed of that white, milky dispelling agent.

You see

in his bag on the table with his effects that were sort of taken off in this moment,

there is correspondence from a place called the Carnissary,

which is in Caro and appears to be, if not the major, a major major guild hall of the class coronet

within this sort of satchel of his you find a ledger book of I'll actually ask for an investigation check here

18 let's go

Moving through I mean this is it right this is what it's about you're you're moving through looking looking through this place the same instincts that let you understand that this was a trap allow you to understand

that

you are trying, as you do that divine sense and reach out for a connection, you,

much like someone understanding the prey that they seek, go, how do I think like what I'm hunting?

And you move into this position of looking through a ledger book.

You know, unfortunately, he doesn't have any letters being like, Wizard Keen, our evil plan, as you're well aware.

But he does have a ledger book.

He does have what he needs to keep track of his own guild and more specifically his appointments.

You see that about

two or so months ago, he had a

number of meetings with the Scepter's Chorus in the city of Caro.

And you see that there looks like a

transfer of goods from the Scepter's Chorus to the glass coronet, and you see that there are

indications therein

that

other imperial representatives would be at some of these engagements.

One of them that you see

is the lady Iramin Telniket,

who you didn't have any one interactions with, but you saw her very briefly with the prince, with Prince Kamari Olfgang Saraz.

Also, I think in this ledger book of his,

you find an address in the city of Caro

for the Carnissary,

which is, it doesn't have a numbered address, but it just says the Carnissary at Cavender Court,

which you would imagine having been in some larger,

or having been in some places like Port Tallinn, courts are usually like a cul-de-sac unto themselves.

It's like that the street is clear.

The city is not such that they have to number buildings there.

It's like, oh, Cavinger Court is here, right?

His ledger book really fills up about two months ago.

It looks like around that time, things really start to pick up for him.

And,

you know, the timeline lines up for you pretty...

pretty reasonably that the glass coronet has a huge uptick in not only its business but the people it's speaking to meetings with imperial bureaucrats meetings with delegates of the Citadel, meetings with the Scepter's Chorus, meetings with the Azure Battalion,

meetings with all different groups starting in the aftermath of Naram's escape from Port Talon.

That it is after those events.

But I think what's interesting is you...

there's a gap after

that like

business starts to go up for him in the pretty immediate aftermath

but it is

about halfway between then and now that he has his first meeting with the Scepters Chorus, and that's when everything picks up.

So it's like the glass coronet gets busy right away, but then they start talking to other people about halfway in between then and now.

I think Ursulan's brain spins on all of these thoughts, but is brought back to the present moment when he finds himself gripping the leisure book so hard, he tears the cover

and realizes that the information in here is quite precious and is going to

close it and put it with his things.

Did I see this?

You would hear

a quiet kind of ripping, but apart from that, no.

See, the fox looks over and goes,

Are we messing with books?

Well, no, no, not in

the middle sense.

There's three books.

Oh, Suvi would want this one.

All right.

You see,

the last thing you'll find in his effects, by the way, is a...

You see, there is a small

circular, flat piece of like sea glass

that has writing in the lingua arcana on it.

But you see that there is one piece of gold inlaid on the seaglass that has imperial writing, not writing in the lingua arcana.

That imperial writing has stitched in extremely fine

molten gold lettering that just says,

that says Cavender Court on it.

But you don't, on an 18, you can't understand what the lingua arcana says, but it looks to you

to be incredibly fragile.

And there is a

dotted

line of gold

points through the center of the sea glass disc that appears to not be, you wouldn't call it lingua arcana because it's just it's very much a dotted line.

It looks like something.

And you notice that the dots perforate into the sea glass pretty pointedly.

They're not, they're deeper than the writing of Cavender Court is.

They puncture the glass a little more deeply.

Amay.

Do you understand what this might be?

Oh,

I take a look at it.

Give me an arcana check.

I have never seen anything like this in my life before.

In fact, I couldn't remember the word for sea glass

with the natural one.

The natural one.

Yeah,

it's magical for sure.

Well, we'll have to ask Sufi what this is.

Yes.

How you described as fragile?

Desperate not to break it.

Ame, do you mind caring?

It seems

you know I'm

clumsy in those ways.

Yes, I shall care for this.

And Ame takes it gingerly and wraps it up and places it in a pouch.

Let's get out of here.

And Ame

casts ceremony, but as a ritual, which is a shorter time, and she just claps her hands, and Keen's body just explodes, and she turns around without looking at it.

Explodes?

You heard me?

Ursula's walking

walks up the stairs and goes, whoa.

Whoa.

All right.

Don't turn around.

Oh, God.

Are you doing a funeral rite here?

It's a funeral rite.

But it's just

so much more haphazard versus Captain Emless and

the rituals that she performed for other bodies.

This is just...

She needs it gone.

What does it explode into?

Just viscera?

Yes, it's viscera, and it starts to disintegrate in flames, withering into ash.

The fox fire ember comes up from the center of his chest, spreads along his veins, and he scatters into gray, tumbling ash as his body vanishes from the world.

Are you hungry?

Incredible.

The fox looks and goes,

God's spirits.

What the fuck is that?

And it says, All right, right, let's go.

It says, Mouse, you're scary.

I think every song, you remember a moment of Ahmed cackling, framed in light, as Keene met his cruesome end.

And maybe there's even a positive feeling towards, hey,

sometimes you got to cackle and let somebody know they should have listened to you when you said, don't cross me.

I told him.

Told him.

Told him exactly what would happen.

Stealth check, you have advantage, and the fox is going to give you advantage on a stealth check getting out of here, Ame.

19.

11.

Okay.

As you begin to move out from this place,

on a group stealth check will take the 19.

Thank you.

But because both of you did not pass the difficulty, I'm going to ask

you get up into the courtyard back through the cheese shop where you came.

This is nearer to the outskirts of town than

the block and a half away where the horses are hitched.

Are you going back to get the horses?

They will greatly increase your speed, but I will need you to make another stealth check that you will both have to pass.

I think in Ursulan's mind, he was headed for the waterfront.

Okay.

If there is not a more convenient way back, then I I think Ursulon will lead us that way.

I think it's the area where the horses were, I think Ursulan knew of craft that could take us downriver.

Copy that.

Either you can give me perception or insight in this moment as you get through the cheese shop back into the street.

16 perception for Ursulon.

Okay.

Lots of activity, and this is frankly you, it's uh, you've gotten out of that cheese sh

It, you know, I would say the wizard keen was alive less than five minutes ago by the time you get up out of the street.

Oh, damn.

Ame, what do you get?

Uh, 12 perception.

12 perception.

Okay.

You don't see a friend of activity right now.

Uh, what do you want to do?

Let's take the stealth checks.

Gonna go ahead for the horse.

You're gonna go further into town towards the you're not even going for the horse.

You're going for the water.

I'm going for the water.

Okay.

I saw canoes.

I saw other sorts of things.

I think that's where Ursula's attention lies.

Great.

I am going to, once again, the fox is going to give Ahmed advantage.

You have advantage from your boots.

Go ahead and give me the stealth checks.

The difficulty, I'm going to let you know right now, is a 15.

6.

12.

Okay.

You begin to move through the town.

I would say you're within,

you're probably like

four blocks west of the town center, probably another seven blocks towards the waterfront, little sort of shopping area within Reedport, wagons, imperial soldiers everywhere.

And Ursulan, about a block east of you towards the city center, you hear an imperial voice shout out, There she is!

We've been here before.

What do you do?

How far are horses?

And how far is waterfront?

Waterfront is seven blocks away.

Okay, horses.

Horses are

one block past the voice that just shouted.

Ursulan, go invisible.

I don't know, Abbey.

I think Ursulan, hearing that, is going to walk normally until he's not close enough to Ahme to be associated with her and then go invisible.

Okay, copy that.

Ahme, what do you do?

I see that there's a wagon moving down the alleyway towards the street where the horses are.

I miss the step and I appear inside the back of the wagon.

In a flash of mist,

you and the fox are in in the back of a wagon filled with war staves, magical ammunition, summoning salt, binding things, weaponry of war, trundling along on a horse-drawn wagon.

Soundlessly, you appear in there so the driver of the wagon does not hear you, and you hear a voice going, she's teleported!

As soldiers rush past the wagon towards the intersection you just left.

Ursulan, you are walking away from this interaction and no one has any reason to recognize you.

The only interactions you've had in town are tying horses up and asking to help a cheese shop.

So I think I'll bank down an alleyway,

skip over a street, and then head down to the horses on a less turbulent boulevard.

Hell yes.

Ame, trundling along on the wagon, you realize that, yes, the Imperial soldiers, you were taken publicly by the wizard team.

The Imperial Army knows your face, face, knows how you're dressed, knows to look for you, and they know the fox.

I would like to stealthily leave the wagon, but as I do, I pass my hand through my hair and I use disguise self at second level.

Incredible.

What does Ahme look like as she changes her appearance?

As I step out, I am the most nondescript person.

I'm the kind of unremarkable,

unnoticeable

person

with clothes to match.

As you begin to cloak yourself using this witch's magic,

you can feel yourself borrowing faces and expressions and articles of clothing from the people around you.

Like all witches magic, this is based on communion with the world that is and the world beyond.

And so if you need to look like you belong in Readport, just borrow those things that are of Reedport for a moment.

And you create some average of the people that populate this place.

The fox jumps into your bag.

He looks up, flattens his ears, twitches his nose, and goes, very cunning.

And you leap out of the back of the wagon, disguised.

You look down down the alley and see Bear, the strongest man in Silbury, untying the horses at the edge of the alley.

I stroll over.

Good day, sir.

Miss?

Get away from me.

No.

That's great.

Miss, hands off.

Good day, sir.

It's me.

Amy?

Yes.

See, I can be discreet.

Look at that.

I think our plan should be to head out of Redport and

borrow some local's boat down the road.

You saddle up and head out of Redport.

No stealth check required because Ahme is not seen in this moment.

You head down the road, looking for a friendly farmer.

And let me tell you, it's going to be very easy to buy a boat with three Imperial horses.

Suvi.

Early morning light is

a sort of faint muddy brown smudge towards the surface of the river above you as you swim mightily downstream.

From in front of you, Yorin speaks back and goes,

Your friends, they're in Reedport.

Last I heard,

I think a wizard, a guild mage, may have them bound.

All right, we'll get to the water's edge and we'll send up a scout to look.

Thank you.

You

feel yourself in this moment as sort of the shape changers lurk at the bottom of the river.

You see that one of them swims up towards the surface, and as it gets towards the top, just

change into a duck that pops out of the water, shakes the water out its feathers, and flaps into the town of Frankfort.

Before that happens,

sorry, walking it back.

If I can speak underwater, can I cast?

I think, yes, with water breathing, you can cast underwater.

Yeah.

Cool.

As I see, like, the scout sort of splinter from the group, I'm going to

wave my hands underwater and then go, hey, oh, I could talk.

Oh, I could talk.

Hold on, look at me.

And I'm going to cast a series of pressed digitations to make like 3D images of, like, this is what Ahme looks like.

This is what her fox looks like.

This is what Ursulan looks like.

This is what Vandal looks like.

And then Keen and as many of the, like,

as many of the guild mages as I can, like, reasonably attempt to recreate and just give them one-offs and be like, keep an eye out for all of these people.

I just rolled a nat 20.

That's always fun.

Let's go, duck.

You're lurking in deep water outside of Reap or you see big imperial barges moving overhead, and you see the shape changers all kind of in their monstrous forms look up at the ships that glide over them.

And

less than 20 minutes later, a duck hits the surface, swims down

once more, and you see that a

crocodile

comes up to Yorin, speaking to him, and just goes,

The Wizard Keen is dead.

News is spread through the town.

Oh, cover them.

There is a search being conducted for the witch Army.

And nothing of Bear of Toma?

There There has been no mention of any Bear of Toma.

Perfect.

I know where they're headed.

Ursulan,

Ame.

You

arrive

at a small sort of like farmer's cottage, like probably like three or four miles down the road from Reedport.

You see that there is an older woman here.

This farm is largely like citrus orchards.

There's like lemon trees and things like that here.

And she looks at you and just says,

Well, for three Imperial steeds, I'd be more than happy to give you a rowboat.

And I mean, these horses are worth far more than that.

But

where are you attempting to travel to?

You know that we are quite near the front lines.

Yes, we have uh

I have a uh well, I'd like to think of him as a lover that is near the front lines.

I kind of want to surprise him and see him before

any action happens.

Aw, give me a persuasion check.

I want to surprise my lover on the front lines.

It's crazy,

15.

She looks at you and says, Oh, I remember when I was young.

Tell me more.

Well,

my first husband.

I'm so sorry.

Oh, sorry.

Yes, I had just to.

Long story short, I snuck into camp and I knocked one of the sentries unconscious.

And I ended up conceiving my eldest that night.

And I was later tried for treason.

But

I was acquitted because my uh my lover at the time had been promoted to captain due to his heroic efforts in the war.

And the sentry did recover.

That

is

so romantic.

I understand.

Sometimes, if it might be the last time, I hope that in this embrace, if you wish, that you too become with child.

Thank you.

Your story will give me strength.

Take a lemon.

Oh, thank you.

Let me take some citrus.

The fox looks up at you.

You bear has watched the craziest shit happen in the spirit world ever.

This human shit, though.

This human shit, though?

What?

Thousands of foxes.

Take a lemon.

Blow his back out.

The fox looks up at you, Ursula, and goes, I'm with you on this.

It's quite strange.

On this, I'm with you.

I mean, I'm amazed we found another person who is also

excited sexually by being so close to war.

I think

humans

associate doing it with death in a way I don't quite get.

Me neither.

It's like, oh,

like you've done it.

Yeah.

I've done it.

I've done it.

And if I feel like I'm going to die, I don't do it.

you

as well i've never

done it with someone who was considering or ill or

there's i've heard well i've heard the boss talk and be like there's something like oh if you like if you get stepped on and it's like no if i get stepped on i'm hurt so i don't want to do it ame was speaking about being stepped on and doing it well she mentioned like a it's that some people like uh uh, you know, there's like a men.

I don't fully get it, right?

I don't even, it doesn't even like

feel good necessarily.

It's like you do it because you're it's like, oh, I'm gonna freak out if I don't do it.

And then you do it, and then you're like, okay, we did it.

I've done it for doing its sake.

Really?

So you're like them.

You see it?

I am not like them.

Okay.

I'm not like them.

Okay.

I'm going to throw a lemon at you.

Good luck.

Good luck.

Just a rip.

I am not like them.

You are.

You do it because it feels good, not because someone's in heat and they're freaking out.

Watch it.

Okay.

Bring me wrong.

Bring me wrong.

Ame is nibbling on her lemon.

That's weird.

You guys

get this nice, sturdy rowboat.

I think, Ursulan and Ame, you would be aware that you're about a few miles from the front lines.

By the way, getting to the riverbank, there is about 15 feet of drop of just like wet earth and roots of the river receding, the water level dropping as it approaches.

12 Brooks.

You're probably about 20 miles still from 12 Brooks, but you're probably only two or three miles from the front lines, which there's no universe where the river is not being watched, and there's no universe where, in other words, you're going to have to cross lines to get to the smuggler's cave, which means imperial attention.

And then it probably shortly thereafter means Gauth attention, means, you know, the houses of the Conteranacht, right?

So

there's an element of the plan here.

You have a boat.

Getting to the smuggler's cave is going to require some cleverness about how do you pass the front lines of combat.

You're trying to get from the Imperial side over to the Gauth side.

Are there any thoughts as you begin to, as you're preparing to set out on the river about how you want to traverse that line, getting through the lines?

How far are we from the line?

Four miles.

Four miles.

Can we see the line?

The lines will

probably sneak up on you.

Past this farm, it'll probably start with either trenches or fortifications.

There will be sky ships.

Remember when you came out of Hallaker Forest and

the shrike descended almost right away?

That's

feels like that will be the case.

That will be the case, yeah.

I think as as they're kind of looking at the boat, looking forward, um,

Ame,

I can

traverse the water, I can breathe underwater, thanks to Naram.

Um, in terms of you,

perhaps if we were to flip the boat, you could

maybe even stand on my shoulders, and I could propel us through

the

most dangerous parts of our journey.

I see.

Yes, that seems like it could work.

We would want to do it under the cover of night.

Yes.

Alright.

Waiting for the cover of darkness.

Ame and Ursulan move down the muddy riverbank, turning the robot over on its side.

The fox is small enough to actually just rest on the underside of one of the rowboat's benches on one of the planks.

So he's like, mmm, gumpy.

Ame has to hold on with her hands with everything like chest and down in the water, but your shoulders and arms up on a plank with air under the rowboat to breathe.

I can also swim.

Partially, yeah, but there's an issue of Ursulan can be fully submerged underwater, and the boat can look like debris, basically.

Oh, can we do that with our whatever time we have?

Can we attach other maybe sticks, perhaps some lemon branches?

Give me a like either a craft check or a deception check.

I'll give you a deception check.

13.

Okay.

I'm gonna do some sort of a

survival check.

Go for it.

Let me see it.

17.

17.

Getting very crafty and like affixing mud and branches so it looks like sort of a

it looks like a clump of

you can see that the river as it has descended has gotten chunkier and muddier as there's less water kind of clearing things away.

So the debris is kind of narrowed down.

You create a pretty passing facsimile of what looks like a river jetsum or river flotsum just kind of moving on its way down.

And also like, broken and battered boats in a war zone is not also that unusual either.

Swimming down, you make your way all the way through enemy lines.

I will go ahead and get some rolls behind the screen here.

And I will ask us for a group stealth check with that 17 deception.

You can go ahead and add a d4 to your role here.

18.

18.

16.

Ursulan, you swim in dark water at night.

The water cloaks you.

The mud surrounds you.

You move

through deep current.

You're moving in the direction of the river.

The swimming couldn't be easier or more pleasant.

You look behind you from time to time, fastened by rope to the prow of an upside-down rowboat.

You see

Ame's feet,

her robe in the water as she hangs onto the plank with air to breathe.

Naram's gift moving you further and further down.

Breathing the water of this muddy river is sort of like breathing smoky air.

It fills your

lungs with a sense of

something sort of foul nearby.

Muffled by ten feet of river water above you.

Light

deep purple, sharp yellow, rich red.

Up above you in the water,

flaming wreckage hits the top of the river.

Sinking around you,

mangled up in warped metal,

destroyed by fire.

Anonymous corpses of some sky vessel ripped apart in mid-air fill the river around you.

You begin to pass through riverways filled with the skeletons of ships.

You see there is some creature down here in the depths, dead and rotting, river fish picking at it.

There's some 20-foot tall giant with an elongated skull and sharp clawed hands rotting at the bottom of the river, an arcane lance pinning it down here with a shattered harpoon chain.

Some

unnamed nightmare of war waiting for you.

Perhaps only you will see it before the bones are picked clean.

You swim past these lines.

Something swims by you in the water,

but ignores you.

For a second, it felt almost like some spirit, perhaps under a bidding,

not of a wizard, but of something else.

The water continues.

You hear the ticking of that watch, undeterred by its submerging.

After silence, and knowing that you have swam far enough to be past the lines,

you will need to confirm where you are on the river to find the smuggler's cave.

How long do you wait before poking your head up out of the surface of the water?

I think Ursulan is probably starting to feel fatigue,

feel tired,

but is going to push as much as he can to when he really

feels silence.

Great.

You do the right thing, even in the fatigue and even of the creeping dread of just having your visibility limited.

And the shapes of wreckage and corpse lining the river.

You go past that, where suddenly those shapes stop.

You know, the freshest wrecks are, of course, where the front lines are, but you get past that to where the river calms down again, and some instinct says, go much farther than this.

And after what feels like too long, you poke your head up.

No stars, no moon, clouded skies.

Pitch black, and you cannot see trees by the riverbank.

The riverbanks here are clogged with a thick gray ash,

and

you cannot tell.

You know that there are no trees near the riverbank, but you're submerged with the lessening of the water level, so you're just looking at ash-covered riverbanks and past it cloudy sky, and you feel like

the lifelessness of this visage you see

is some vision of hell or an underworld based in punishment.

And you cannot imagine what you will see if you climb out of this riverbank and look at the surrounding landscape.

Erslan's going to swim, knock twice on the hull of the rowboat, and then swim under to be with our main side.

Do you know where we are yet?

Close.

Past the lines, for sure.

All right, can you make it?

Of course.

Seems seems truly terrible out there.

Yeah.

I'm sorry we had to come here.

I'm not.

This is exactly where I want to be.

Popping down the mountain.

Arriving at a curve in the riverbank,

you pop your head out again.

A couple more miles of swimming.

You've just had to swim about 18 miles from the length of, you know, it's like swimming from the top of Manhattan to the bottom.

You

more than that, actually.

It's like swimming from the middle.

Kame was kicking.

She's helping.

I helped.

I helped.

You arrive at a bend in the river and you see

exposed on that lowered riverbank

the opening of a smuggler's cave.

You can see like a hitching post for boats that is now above, like, you know, 10 feet above the river level.

As you popped up, you suddenly realized that you were swimming like a foot or two above the bottom

and like

and like three feet below the surface.

Like the water, the river has dropped now.

As you get to the smuggler's cave, you look, and at the edge of your vision,

you also don't know how you're able to see see well until you realize that coming up out of the water, the dark clouds

are

reflecting light.

There is a smudge of a hateful orange glow painting the underside of the clouds.

Something that you can't see in the landscape is creating light that dimly illuminates this riverbed.

You look, the water here is, if you swam another mile in this water, the water would become poison.

You can

see that the water actually just fades into rubble, maybe another half a mile downstream and vanishes.

By the time this gets to 12 Brooks, there,

whatever brooks are in 12 Brooks, are stone dry under these orange clouds.

But you see the smuggler's cave up above you.

Same Knox.

Will you?

Alright.

We should check to make sure that it hasn't been discovered yet.

Moving up towards it, do you want to use any of your abilities to sort of sense anything here?

I'll open up my divine sense.

Any presences beyond the cave?

I'm assuming the landscape is

rife with

you anticipate a sort of landscape rife with the spirit, and you sense a landscape devoid of spirit.

The same dread that would fill you if you dropped a stone down an open well and never heard a splash fills you as your divine sense reaches out to feel

nothing.

I listen and I smell

in the quiet.

Do I sense

anything

in

the natural landscape of this place?

In the cave, are there little mice?

Are there

water bugs?

Is there anything that would lead me to believe that this place has gone to seed?

Give me an inside check.

That's a natural one.

You reach out

in this place

and

do what you have always done,

which is um

you want to feel

the vibration of the spirit.

For the first time in your life,

you hear silence.

It's

like if someone

lived their whole life

in a building that had

busy foot traffic outside or people talking downstairs.

There are noises of the spirit that you never knew were noises because they've never not been humming in the background.

In the same way that a child raised in a city will hear deafening silence the first night they sleep in the countryside, in the same way that you will

stay awake in maddening silence if the spinning fan above your bed suddenly breaks one night.

Something whose breath filled the spirit of this land is gone

in a way you have never felt something be gone before.

Oh, it's

horrible.

It feels like a pressure in my eardrums.

There's

nothing.

Moving up into the cave.

Cave is safe.

There is nothing in here.

Um, quick cursory glance.

Small table.

Like, you see, there's a bench that can open and fold.

There are some moldy blankets.

And off on a side, there's a little silver candlestand and a deck of playing cards.

You see that there are some oars held off and aside.

And at the back of this cave,

you see that there is a sluice, an iron sluice that leads to a a flood offshoot built for if the river floods to save the city of 12 Brooks.

And you know that that irrigation channel is made of mortared stone and it runs deep towards the falls that is about, you know,

that is about three quarters of a mile away, that this sewer will run and hit the northwestern outskirts of town in an aqueduct that connects to other smugglers' channels.

This is the outer, outer, outmost storm drain of the city to protect itself.

Its first line of defense against flooding.

You find in this smuggler's cave.

And you can see the smuggler's cave has flooded numerous.

There's reasons, you know, smugglers use what they can, right?

They're like hiding in a place that's meant to fill with water, so on a bad night they can't use it.

But

Ursulan and Amay, you see

that there is

a

small

table set with with a couple candles, wax dripping off it,

and you see that set on the table is a small

flat felt lily pad,

a single gold coin resting on its side upright.

And you see that there is a small depiction of a black boat.

And I think, Amay, looking at that lily pad,

you

feel

silence.

You look at something and

can't help but feel like

in the way that if someone handed you a blank card on your birthday, if they gave you something that was

that you're looking at that lily pad and it should mean something that it can't or doesn't mean anymore.

Well, it looks like there's nothing here.

And just you, me, and two of the three.

Yes.

Shall we rest here?

Yes, we'll rest and hope Sufi arrives

tomorrow.

And if she doesn't,

she will.

She'll find us.

We'll see.

As you guys begin to bed down

and get ready, it's only a few minutes.

And Ursuline, with that fading divine sense,

looking at that little black boat,

you see something move on it.

There's a little bug or an insect there.

Can I...

Do I recognize the bug?

Though Though it is not illuminated, it is a little firefly.

I approach it, put my finger out.

Firefly walks onto your finger,

illuminates,

and lazily flies out of the cave.

As you watch it go, the entrance to the river fills with shapes

monstrous and enormous.

And suddenly,

human,

as a man, enormous,

comes out and shepherds forward,

Suvi, your true friend.

I think Suvi coming out of the water moves through that like ash muck and like wipes it through her so she's covered in gray and then press it digitates and dries it.

And so it like hardens across her and then with just like a crack of her neck, it all falls off.

Took you long enough.

That was Lou Wilson as Ursulan, Erika Ishii as Ahme, Abria Iyengar as Suvi, and Brennan Lee Mulligan as everyone and Everything Else.

Worlds Beyond Number is edited, designed, and scored by Taylor Moore at Fortunate Horse with additional sound design from Michael Gelfie Studios.

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