232

Gradually the sea mist clears and you catch sight of land on the horizon. Your senses tingle with expectation for you have now entered a new realm of the Plane of Darkness and you are aware of several dramatic changes to your immediate surroundings. The sluggish grey sea has become a muddy brown sludge that clings to your paddle like marsh slime. Every time you break the crusty surface a cloud of tiny black insects erupts from the slime and soars into the warm, fetid air. The sky above is no longer green; it is a bilious yellow and it is streaked with high clouds that flash intermittently with sheet lightning.

Despite the glue-like consistency of the ocean, you detect a strong tidal undertow. Rather than fight it you decide to cease paddling and allow it to carry you towards the distant shore. While you wait for the current to do its work, you retrieve the Tome of Darkness from your Backpack and turn through its pages in the hope of learning some of the secrets of this new, foul-smelling realm.

The page that revealed to you information about Nza’pok’s realm is now blank, but the one following it has changed in both colour and texture. Lines of spidery writing have appeared on a page that now looks and feels like cured animal hide. Once again, using your Magnakai Discipline of Pathsmanship, you are able to decipher much of this arcane text.

The writings tell of two powerful beings called the Künae, the Lords of Decay, and of their Throne of Power which is located upon ‘the rotting corpse of Ghandezh, the Wyrm of Naaros’. You scan the page, passing over a long list of vile deeds that have earned the Künae the right to rule their ignoble realm, until you come to the part which details the secret names which can bind them. The names are ‘Jantoor’ and ‘Rhunadan’. The text instructs those who would use these names in the presence of the Künae to exercise great caution, for if the name that is spoken is not directed at the correct Lord of Decay, the ‘evocator will sacrifice his body and soul and be enslaved to the Künae forever upon the realm of putrefaction’. The text gives no indication of how to identify each of the Künae and does not state how and when their secret names should be used to bind them. Yet it does state that in order to leave their realm one must possess a ‘ring of power’, one of two such rings which exist and are worn ‘upon the first fingers of the right hands of the Künae’.

You close the Tome and stow it in your Backpack. Time has passed rapidly while you have been consulting the book, and your canoe is now but a few hundred yards from the shore. Directly ahead you can see the estuary of a river, and away to your left you note a stony beach which gently ascends to a forest of grey-green trees.

If you wish to paddle your canoe into the river estuary, turn to 216.

If you decide to beach your craft on the stony shore and explore the forest beyond, turn to 85.