An ever increasing sense of wrongness washes over the party as they approach the non-descript cave entrance ahead of them. Each feels static roll across their bodies and the hairs on their arms stand up.
“Hold up everyone,” orders Yenser. “Try looking away from the cave entrance for a few seconds.”
As a group, they look away and each has the novel sensation of confusion between the two minds inhabiting their bodies. Their secular consciousness looses all memory of the cave and begins thinking about where they would go next, while their divine consciousness remembers what they had been doing. Each worldly consciousness believes the information from their divine counterpart, but still has no recollection of what they had been doing.
“Ah gotta say, that’s a new one for me!” muses Hernan, looking back at the cave entrance. “Do we keep going?”
After debating the pros and cons, the party continues forward.
Peering into the cavern, a strange sight confronts them. In the middle of a 50 foot circular room is a pillar of crackling energy, beginning at the base of the floor and stretching up 10 feet, with a width of approximately 5 feet. The energy itself looks like nothing any of them has seen before. It writhes and crackles silently, seemingly confined to the area it is in.
Moving cautiously into the room, each of the heroes approaches the column, feeling the sense of wrongness threatening to overwhelm them. Pushing themselves to the limit, they are able to approach the pillar and gaze into its depths as light from it dances across the cave’s ceiling and walls.
Gevot does a short circuit around the room and reports that the entrance is the only passage he’s able to find.
“What next?” asks Beler, as the group looks at one another.
Suddenly, the cleric Damin’s arm shoots out and plunges itself into the column of energy, disappearing up to her elbow. The rest of the group stare at her in confusion as she gives a slight shrug then pulls her arm back out of the column.
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Her plate armor and gauntlet are unchanged by the energy, but when she pulls the armored glove off, everyone sees that her hand has become a dark indigo color. As she pull back her armor, the coloration could be seen to cover the entirety of her arm that had entered the energy field. Despite attempts to wash or clean it off, the pigmentation of her flesh has been permanently changed.
With a sudden shout, the thief Gevot runs and launches himself into the energy field. His battlecry ends suddenly as he disappears into the field. The remaining members are disturbed at the strange actions the members of the party are taking.
Each of them begins to feel the divine energy that they had been cut off from since coming to the mortal realm. It feels like being on the verge of starvation, then taking a bite of food. They feel a slight connection to Chronos restored and the energy begins to fill them again. A blue light, which would have been invisible to anyone other than divines, exits the column and they hear, through their telepathic connection with Gevot’s time sprite, that his body had disintegrated within the column and only his time sprite remains.
Backing away from the column, the party silently confers through divine communication with one another and rapidly determines that Gevot’s time sprite can move through walls and scout the area for them, moving at roughly walking speed. They also determine that they could increase the rate of divine energy gathering within them, but left on it’s own it would fill them in about one day’s time.
Having scouted the area and not found any hidden tunnels, the group doesn’t know what to do without Gevot. They decide to pull more divine energy to discover what will happen once they are full.
Moments later they all spring back to full awareness as time sprites in the divine realm again. They see their past stretching back to when they first inhabited the temporal adventurers after Lady Grace had been bitten by the giant spider. They find that, by reaching group consensus, they can go back to any point in time leading up to where they lost one of their members. They also become aware that they can switch bodies and change which adventurer each of them inhabits, but none of them have any interest in changing.
Much like learning the ability to isolate a muscle you had never consciously used before, the group becomes aware of how they can pull on this energy and travel back in time even if one of them has not died.
Following a discussion of their options, the group finds themselves back in time after entering the cave and decides to camp for the night instead of entering the energy field. In the morning, after a restless night disturbed by the malevolent energy, they leave the cave and continue their journey through the forest.