Pari must have blacked out again. She awoke with a massive headache. But she was no longer moving, and it wasn't completely dark in this weird diving bell things she was in. Soft light streamed through the hatch’s window.

What had happened?

She had climbed in here to escape the Storm Reavers. And then she must have activated the sphere because the last thing she remembered was the whole thing falling into the water.

Painfully, she managed to stand up and orient herself. The hatch was now at the top of the sphere. Reaching up on her tiptoes, Pari tried to turn the locking wheel. It wouldn’t budge.

Great.

Her head was still pounding, so she cast healing touch on herself. That did the trick. Her head cleared, and she took another crack at the wheel.

After working at it for several minutes, she finally was able to open the hatch. Immediately, she was hit with the smell of cool, ocean air.

That felt good.

She jumped up and pulled herself through the hatch and then slid down the metal sphere on to a beach. As she stood up and brushed the sand from her clothes, she caught a glimpse of something that nearly made her heart stop.

WTF?

It was a giant alien-looking creature standing in the water, a couple of hundred yards offshore.

The creature was terrifying and immense—easily several hundred feet tall. It was roughly shaped like a man, but with incredibly thin, spindly, boney limbs, and a strange head that resembled a hammerhead shark. An extra pair of arms jutted out from the monster’s shoulders, which made it look almost like a spider. Both the head and the limbs had all sorts of chaotic protrusions that looked like little horns or spikes growing out of the body.

She didn’t know if it was too far away to inspect, but she gave it a try.

:::::. Cormorian. (Legendary). Hostile. .:::::

Pari watched, mesmerized, as the Cormorian slowly walked away from the shore, towards the sun which hung low in the sky. It felt like forever until the monster gradually disappeared into the fog, but the terror still stayed with her. It was only the sound of a message alert that broke her out of her reverie.

:::::. New message from Justin. Listen? .:::::

“Yes.”

As Pari listened to Justin’s message, she felt a stab of guilt. She had just left him there at the party alone. Sure, it wasn’t her fault; it was those slimy Hawks, but still it was wrong of her.

And now he was on some sort of quest with Klothar at Tashon’s Gate?

This was getting weirder and weirder. It must be some sort of new quest system that the devs were testing out.

She rubbed her shoulder, thinking. She really needed to update Lazarus. It would be really bad to put it off any longer, so she just bit the bullet.

“Message to Lazarus: It’s Pari reporting in. I’m okay, but a lot has gone down. The Hawks drugged me so they could get at the sage. Really bad. I woke up on a boat to Northfleet, but then the boat was attacked and now I’m on some deserted shore in god knows where. Oh, and I just saw what looked like an alien giant. It’s called a ‘Cormorian’ and it’s a legendary. This whole things feels like some kind of bizarre quest, but I have no quest objective. Anyway, I don’t even know what level zone I’m in, but I’m going to try to make my way back to a road. Hopefully I won’t die. Message me back and let me know how you guys made out.”

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Ok, that was done. She’d just have to deal with Lazarus once she got back to Rathenhall—if she got back. She noticed that the tide was coming in, which wasn’t good. The beach she was standing on was a thin strip of rocks that ran between the ocean and a line of rugged chalk-white cliffs that rose sharply fifty or sixty feet straight up. Some time soon the water would come right up to the base of the cliff. And then she’d be toast.

Her first priority was to get off this damn beach. She looked north and then she looked south, but all she could see was beach, cliffs, and fog. She looked back out to the water, but there was no sign of the Cormorian. There was also no sign of the ship. Did it sink? If that sphere really did smash through the hold, the ship would have sunk for sure. But there was no debris anywhere.

Pari turned back to inspect the sphere and walked all around it. It really did look like an ancient diving bell, and it was scratched and banged up pretty badly. She noticed that there didn’t seem be any places to tie anything on to sphere, however, which made her diving bell theory seem less likely. How would you pull the thing up from the bottom of the ocean? Unless it was meant to be carried around in a net. Who knew?

She sat down on a boulder, took a deep breath, and tried to concentrate. Where exactly was she?

The sailor had said that they left from the town of Lorque which was on some bay. And they were almost out of that bay when they had been attacked. Okay…

The geography of this part of Greystrand was a blur. All Pari knew was that there were four seaports: Lorque, Port Arlin, Jodrell, and Northfleet. She was somewhere between Lorque and Port Arlin. Didn’t the sailor say they would be in Port Arlin in a few hours?

How much faster was sailing than walking? Her engineer’s brain kicked in. If only she had her phone to do some calculations. And a decent map. Oh well. She’d just wing it.

Just as a rough starting point she knew that a sailing ship was quite a bit faster than someone walking. How much faster? Twice as fast? Five times? Probably not that much. Maybe three or four times as fast. If that was right, you could quadruple the time to sail to Port Arlin—just to be conservative—and you'd get eight hours to hike to Port Arlin. But that assumed you followed the shoreline.

The good news was that Port Arlin was on a bay which was a little inland. That much she knew. So it might be possible to go straight east and cut a bunch of time off the travel since the route would be more direct. How much time? That depended on how far north or south she was from Port Arlin. But as she thought about it, Pari decided that it really didn’t matter. If she was anywhere remotely near where she thought she was, she’d hit a road no matter what—as long as she walked straight east. It might take her a day. Or a day and a half. But she would eventually hit the road from Oakford Cross to Port Arlin. That was the good news.

The bad news was that she’d be out here in this wilderness for the night. With nothing to eat or drink. And no weapons besides her dagger. In a zone that she was very unfamiliar with.

That sucked.

But what sucked worse was the sudden realization that all her nice calculations didn’t mean a thing if she couldn’t get off this beach and up on to the top of those cliffs.

She looked down and saw that the water was noticeably closer. Soon it would be lapping at her feet. Not good. She needed to move. Now.

North or south?

In which direction might be a valley or a stream or a collapsed section of cliff? There was no way to tell. So she flipped a shell. Top of the shell meant north. Bottom meant south.

The shell landed top up.

North it was.

Pari hitched her belt tight, checked that all her pouches were still in place, and then set off at a jog north along the rocky beach.

As she ran, she thought about Justin. She needed to get back to him. If he wasn’t with the Hawks, there still might be a chance to recruit him. And then maybe Lazarus wouldn’t think she was such a colossal screw up.

Wishful thinking.