After evening meal, I had an hour-long meditative flute session, and gathered my things for traveling, so I would be well-prepared in the morning to begin this next phase of my training. However, instead of waking on my pallet in my cell, I woke upon a strange beach. Strange is hardly the word -- there are two suns here! There are two others with me, though not from home. They are both half-elven, but don't seem to know each other any more than they know me. Avery(?) seems an outdoorsman, and Nethara a sailor of some sort. Both seem distrustful, but who can blame them, really.
We all lay in some sort of glyph in the sand. It put me in mind of Master Quoth's teleportation circle, if Master Quoth used some unfamiliar magic in an unfamiliar world. None of us could make any more sense of it. Above us, on the hillside, a figure spoke in my head: "You know what you have to do. You have your orders. Go. Bring peace." I might have investigated this thought-voice phenomenon more were it not for my confusion. I have no idea what I have to do; I have no orders. Bring peace to whom? to what? Go where? Before I could do more than wonder for an instant, the figure had vanished, leaving us to try and make sense of this place.
There was a huge city roughly half a day's journey away, and we felt a pull, and so discovered Donbuset, capital of the Ousuterion Empire. The people here are odd in a way I can't quite explain. Also, it is apparent that there has been some conflict in recent years with halflings, as many of the locals mistrust me and are openly hostile. Despite this, we found a lovely tavern, the Expensive Whistle, and the bartender, Nezitzin (or "Zin"), was very helpful. They told us that there is supposedly a plot to assassinate King Ettor, which explains the immense guard presence.
With little else to guide us, we approached the palace, hoping for some epiphany. We were struck instead with an invitation. A dwarven guard seemed to recognize us and escorted us forthwith to the throne room, where we met King Ettor -- little more than a child, really. Imagine the authority of a master bestowed on the acolyte as he enters the monastery for the first time. It boggles.
He summoned his advisors (I assume), a matched pair of elves named Ellisora and Grissik, who, with great gravity, told us that they could not tell us anything, but reassured us that we would always be ourselves, no matter what we looked like (a truism I grasped long ago). They further warned us to have strength, power, and kindness, and so save "everything."
And the suns are STILL high in the sky. How long is a day here, anyway?
