Vanya sighed in relief at the sudden end to the clamor in her skull, and she went about seeing to the injured. She cast healing touch on everyone but Ewtain. Maroftis seemed to be the worst off, so she enhanced the spell that she cast on him. The creature had inflicted mental harm instead of physical harm, and his regeneration didn’t seem to be healing him. After her spell, though, Maroftis was able to roll over and thank Vanya for her help.
Once Vanya was done with her ministrations, Ewtain strolled over to the group. He pulled the small sphere out of his inventory. It glowed faintly, and Vanya could now see that it was not actually purple. It was mostly black and flecked with small bits of luminescent purple. “So, the thing was called a Demon of Shadows, and apparently this is its core,” Ewtain said, holding it up for all to see.
“How do you know it’s a core?” Taloc asked.
“When I put it in my inventory, it was given a name. There was also a note on cores in general. Certain spells can extract the power within a core to do all sorts of things.”
“Like what?” Isla asked
Ewtain shrugged. “I’m not a magic man, but some game systems have a spell component feature, so I would imagine that sort of thing. I would guess that the good stuff can be ripped out of the core and stuffed into a magic item.”
Vultressant looked at him skeptically. “You have no idea, do you?” he said as if stating a fact.
Ewtain looked shocked for a split second until a small smile disrupted his feigned indignation. “What? It’s true, but those are likely uses for the thing.”
“Stuff it into a magic item?” Isla asked. Ewtain just shrugged and put it back into his inventory. “Are you keeping party treasure now?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
Ewtain shrugged again. “Clearly, that was some sort of demonic creature—it even has demon in the name. I’m going to hang on to it in case it’s cursed or something, and I don’t know what happened before I got here, but you guys were doing a lot of lying down and not a lot of killing. I saved your bacon.” Isla looked about to say something, but he cut her off by quickly holding up a hand and saying, “If it looks like someone else can use it more than me, I’ll give it to them.” She looked placated by this, so Ewtain moved on. “However, this thing was a Demon of Shadows, and I’m a Night Stalker, so it looks like it’s meant for me.” He turned around and walked towards the far wall before she could counter.
“I had to actually name the essences that I have pulled out of creatures,” Vultressant said. “How is it that your interface just does it for you?”
“Hmm. Mine’s just better?” Ewtain said, shrugging as he walked. “Cores and essences are different? The demon is similar to me? It can’t be known.”
Vanya looked around; the room that they were in was square, and dimly lit by luminescent rocks which sat in translucent bowls placed in each corner. There was also a brazier in the center of the room that looked to be identical to the one they had used to activate the portal. There was a foreign script written in the center of each of the walls in glowing letters. She hoped that Vultressant’s language ability would extend to writing, so she called out to him, “Hey Vult, any idea what all the writing means?”
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Vultressant regarded the writing more closely. “I don’t know what language the writings are in, so it may not be in a language, or it may work differently with writing, or maybe my ability just didn’t trigger for it. I can say that I feel that it’s some sort of containment spell.” He looked up at the ceiling and pointed. “See, there’s another one in the center of the ceiling, just above the brazier.” He then walked over to the brazier, and he noticed more markings on the ground around it. “There are more here as well. I’m guessing that the markings were put here to keep something contained, presumably the demon. Wait, I have a notification.” He paused to read the message. “According to my decipher script ability, they are glyphs, but I am not skilled enough to read them. My feeling about the containment came from my basic knowledge of the glyphs through the skill. I did get a level for the skill for the effort though, so that’s nice.”
“I found a hidden door,” Taloc called from one corner of the room. He then proceeded to open the door and walk out of the room. The rest of the group quickly followed the Ranger. They entered some sort of workroom that looked to have been deserted for some time. The room was lit with the same rock bowls that were in the demon room; it also contained several long metal tables that looked like the examination tables used at a morgue. There was a large door on the far end of the room, which Taloc went over to and cautiously opened to reveal a kitchen area. They continued to go through rooms in the abandoned building until they found an exit.
Outside, they were greeted by a breathtaking view from atop a large hill. The building was surrounded on three sides by a steep drop that made the entrance the only side from which the building could reasonably be approached. Much of the building looked like a fortification, and it resembled a small castle. They were on the highest of many hills in the area from what Vanya could discern, but there were mountains to the northwest based on the location of the suns in the sky.
“Well, we are supposed to be heading for the mountains,” Ewtain said. “Hopefully these are the right ones.”
“We’re quite a bit closer to Ildul now,” Vultressant said as he referenced his HUD. He waved a hand, and a map appeared before him. The area they had come from was filled out in great detail, and there was a large void and a spot far to the northwest that contained a glowing green dot. Vultressant pointed at the dot. “This is where we are now, and this is where the temple is.” He pointed at an area far to the east. He then pulled up the regional map that he had been given by the Anurans, resized it, and moved it to overlay his detailed map. “Provided that the scale is correct, we should be maybe a week closer to our destination after the teleport. We overshot it a bit to the north, so we just need to go west and a little south to get there. The terrain is hilly, but we can try to skirt the hills on their southern end to get us there more quickly.”
“How sure are you of this?” Taloc asked.
Vultressant considered for a moment. “Well, the Anuran map shows some hills that stretch along the side of the mountain range, and those mountains,” he said, pointing to the west where large mountains loomed on the horizon, “seem to match these on the map.” He then ran a finger over the mountain range on the map, and he stopped, pointing at the southernmost peak. “This should be where Ildul is,” he concluded, looking up at Taloc.
Taloc nodded. “We have some daylight left. Do we rest here or continue on for a while?”
Isla spoke first. “I need to rest, but I don’t want to do it here, where anything could be coming through the portal that we just left open.”
“We can travel to the base of the hill and make camp there,” Taloc said. The rest of them had no argument, and they wearily set off to find a good place to rest—it had been a long day.