EGO "awoke" as much as he ever did, in that he sloughed off his meditative slumber and began to pay attention to his outer world again. He had had the most peculiar vision, as he rested, expelling gases that had built up over the previous day's activity.
It was disturbing, how much of the atmosphere could end up trapped inside his plasmoid physique during the normal course of everyday operations.
The vision had been peculiar in that he did not generally have visions, and he never had dreams. Oh, he had experienced hypoxia previously...he had led a long and eventful life. So yes, technically, he had had visions, before then. This one, however, was distinctly devoid of talking pink platypuses.
In fact, it had seemed as if the vision had been happening from his perspective. Or, as if his perspective was that of someone else's. At first, he had been calming and centering thoughts about his home on Luna, the smaller of Tellus' two moons. That was not unusual, if a tad rare, but this vision had been different...
...Pükul ran as fast as he could manage without the skirt of plaited fenton-reeds he was wearing falling off. He had to get out of town quickly. Perhaps even off island. Living had been getting hard around Nopaltzinitza lately, anyway. Maybe a jaunt on out to the far isles would be in order, even.
The chain fastened to the collar around his neck jangled a bit as he adjusted his stride for the umpteenth time in the space of perhaps two minutes. Pükul sighed. He needed to get out of these clothes before he could go anywhere, and at the moment he could no more do that than he could fly away like a rampant Aoquaquatl. "First things, first," said he to himself, and he slowed to a walk, collecting his composure as he paced along letting his heart slow. He looked back the way he came, terrified that he would catch a glimpse of someone chasing him down, but the jungle remained silent except for his ragged breathing and the tinkling clank of the broken chain. He had been unable to keep it silent no matter how hard he tried, and the faint metallic chiming that accompanied his every step had him quite nonplussed. He had to get this collar off, somehow.
"Slow down, Pükul, think. Think!" He slowed his thoughts, concentrating on the hog-path he was following through the thick jungle. The mountain's shoulders rose above his right hand side, and he found with some surprise that he had gotten further down the slope than he thought. He was getting dangerously close to the concentric rings of habitation starting just downslope from him, and he froze up, suddenly panicking. But the moment passed, and he found himself walking as if he were in a waking dream. Walking toward the middle of town, and the smithy that would be banked up and dormant for the night, he paused only to burgle an errant sarape from next to a pitz court. Thankful for the near constant blanketing of early morning fog his island experienced for perhaps the first time in his nineteen years, Pükul pulled the sarape close, nicked a wide brimmed hat woven from maize leaves and fenton-reeds, and pulled it low. "Gods, I hope there are no lice in this hat..." The absurdity of such a mundane thought after the night he had just experienced almost made him laugh out loud. Instead, he winced at the pain of his no doubt broken ribs. At least his lung was not punctured. He knew that much.
After what seemed like much too long, Pükul arrived at the open-air smithing yard, and took a deep breath. Stuffing a stropping leather between his skin and the collar, he crouched low behind the workbench, and got to work with a file. With a start and an audible gasp! of surprise, the morning's first bell rang from the fifty foot tall belltower just past the smithy. To his horror, he heard a curse from inside the smith's house as the tolling of the bell woke the poor woman. She staggered to her feet, breathed some life into an oil lamp close by her bedside, and sleepily walked out of her door and across her yard to the privy, having a good old fashioned scratch while she was at it. She walked past not three feet from Pükel, who had frozen like a scared armadillo. Groaning in relief, Grotl the smith farted, pissed like an alpaca on water-weed, and cleaned herself up thoroughly. Banging the door to her privy open, the smith stumbled back to her home, again passing within accurate spitting distance of Pükul, who by then had his eyes clamped tightly shut and was silently praying to Oghma and Myra with all his might.
Until the day he died, he would never truly understand how the smith had not seen him, crouched there, using her rasp to break out of a slave collar. All he could ever figure was that maybe the divines had, indeed, heard him somehow.
For Grotl's part, she returned to bed to sleep off a spectacular hangover. She was so drunk, she could have sworn she saw one of those white-skinned Singers, the ones from across the sea, curled up in the foetal position underneath her workbench. The shards of the collar the next morning, and pieces of chain, however, gave proof to the lie, and in a flash of brilliance Grotl threw them all into the crucible with some other scrap iron in order to make some hinges she had been hired to fabricate. Not an hour later, she had to put all that on hold to make the fittings for a murdered noble's casket. Murdered by his slave, they whispered. The richest man on the island, Grotl had of course heard of him. A boorish slob of a playboy, he had gotten many young women pregnant and then forced one or another of his entourage to wed the poor girl, or abandoned her altogether.
She never felt a moment's guilt at letting the slave escape. Not a single pang.
EGO made his way to the longboats as the sailors stepped up the davits and started sending parties ashore to secure raw materials to repair the ship. The set up and resources the Captain and his crew had available were, simply put, impressive. al-Adin had set up a lumber mill, using a chain that he had cannibalized from the anchor locker. He was working on welding sharp iron teeth on to the links; they had a portable forge that they had set up on the beach, and a team of people making charcoal in order to fire it. Another team, under the guidance of the Captain himself, was quickly erecting a makeshift windmill and gearbox out of yard arms, catch-blocks, and battens.
The adventurers felt singularly useless.
"So, you dreamed that you were a slave..." Killian said to EGO, who shook his head fuidly.
"No, my friend. I do not dream," EGO told him.
"So," Killian continued, unperturbed, "you had some kind of hallucination that you were a slave, escaping from somewhere?"
"I believe it was from here, from this island. I was running from a town and ziggurat that were over by that hill," Ego pointed to the east, toward a low hill rising out of the foothills.
Kit stood up, grinning from ear to ear. "Well let's belay the chatter and get to walkin'," Kit said with a lopsided grin. Devlin couldn't help but notice that her smile went all the way to her eyes.
EGO flowed to his feet. "I must admit, my curiosity has been piqued," EGO's accent was such a strange mix of monotone and expressive, it could be mesmerizing to listen to him speak. "But I did not want to impose upon the group."
Faerinn stood looking around. "This reminds me of my dream, also. The landscape is at least remarkably similar..." The small man looked at the rest of the party, who were all looking back at him in surprise, which made him blush.
He hated how socially awkward he was.
"I dreamed of a witch, who imprisoned a water genie under a hill," Faerinn blinked.
The party blinked back at him. Devlin walked over to Fae, placing his hand on the slim man's surprisingly sinewy shoulder. "Are you, ok, friend?"
Fae blinked back a tear. Care and affection were not things he was used to receiving.
"Aye, I am...okay," Faerinn patted Devlin's hand awkwardly, but the smiles the two men exchanged were absolutely genuine. "Thank you!"
Killian chuckled, taking a pull from his pipe. He had found some quality pipe weed somewhere, probably amongst the crew. He had already set up a contact amongst the crew for future smuggling operations...Killian was nothing if not likable. A wonderful conversationalist, the winged tiefling could talk a white gloved man into cheerfully buying catsup popsicles.
"I don't know about you lubbers, but I'm thinkin' it has become eminently clear we need to explore this here island. Eggo had me at 'mound'."
Devlin chuckled. Killian was undisciplined, true, but he made up for it with sheer heart. His sister, Kit, was an intriguing personality, and had already set off to the east, toward the mid sized mound EGO had pointed out. It looked like nothing so much as just another foothill of the volcano rising up in the background, covered in vegetation and fauna, but Kit had taken a bead, and decided all the small talk and indecision was just not for her.
So, Kit had shouldered a light pack and set off.
Devlin followed Kit with a wry grin, and a curious need to know what she was going to do next.
Kit used her shortsword to help clear the path forward as she made her way toward the triangular mound of dirt and stone. It was completely assimilated by the surrounding rain forest, edges blurred by vegetation and time. She was taking EGO's word for it that the mound was a mound at all. As far as she knew right now, it was just a pointy hill.
After a couple of hours of walking, Kit climbed a low embankment and found herself walking along a perfectly level patch of ground stretching off to the east. Unshouldering her pack, she sat down and broke out a hardtack biscuit to gnaw on as she waited for the others. She did not have long to wait. Devlin stalked into the little clearing Kit had found almost silently. A few minutes longer, and Faerinn stepped out of the brush, swiftly climbed a nearby tree, and hung there, upside down.
"There were causeways in my dream," Faerinn said softly. Kit nodded...it was why she had stopped. EGO followed everyone up, acting as their rear guard.
"I also recall raised walkways. Raised structures that all converged at a central plaza," EGO mused.
"Aye, with the pyramid in the middle of that plaza. There were pools of water," Faerinn added. EGO nodded in agreement.
Kit smashed the hardtack biscuit with the hilt of her dagger, finally breaking it into bite sized pieces with a satisfied "ha!". The group sat and ate for a half an hour, chatting with one another about their homes or loved ones. But before too long, in an unspoken general consensus, they all began walking together. This causeway was utterly overgrown with vines and vegetation, but still much less difficult to travel along than the wild hog path that they had been following.
The jungle around them had a voice, and a palpable heartbeat that kept the party on edge for another two hours as they progressed closer and closer to what they had come to call "The Hill", though truth be told the nearer they came, the more clearly man made it was. Other causeways had started meeting up with the one they were traversing, which widened at every intersection, until they were travelling along a broad roadway with room for several of them to walk abreast. With every step, The Hill loomed closer. The amount of labor it must have taken to raise such a structure flabbergasted Devlin, who was a woodsman at heart.
Oh, he was used to cities alright. But the cities of Pax were built on an entirely different scale from this...this...mountain of earth and stone. It dwarfed the Old Keep in Craysilt by orders of magnitude.
On either side of them, the landscape dropped off sharply, and before too long they realized they were walking along what would once have been scenic pools of water in a grand park. They all had the realization at once that they were in the center of a vast, abandoned metropolis, that had been reclaimed by the jungle. And, directly ahead of them in the center of it all, rose The Hill.
They walked the causeway to its gates, which stood closed, and overgrown with thick vines and deep mossy pockets. Oak and Faerinn got to work clearing off the upper portions of the massive door, while everybody else worked to remove the debris and overgrowth lower down, and within the space of two hours, they were gathered together in a group, contemplating the double doors to the ziggurat while they passed around Killian's flask of fire brandy.
"So, what do we figure?" Killian finally spoke. Are we going in there, or are we going to stand here looking at the pretty door?"
