When the keel of our vessel touched the shore, the island didn't greet us with the shouts of bandits or welcoming fires. It met us with an icy silence that lasted exactly one minute—just long enough for the dwarf captain to hurriedly shove us onto the ice-slicked pebbles. Then, the sky simply collapsed onto our shoulders.
The weather soured instantly, as if the island had sensed intruders and decided to wring the life out of us before we could reach the first walls. A thick, sticky snow began to fall, turning the world into a white mush where there was no up or down. The wind was so fierce it felt as if it wanted to do more than knock us over—it wanted to literally drink the air from our lungs.
We walked for hours. The miles turned into an endless sequence of steps into nowhere. The burden grew heavier with every league—our backpacks, encrusted with ice, pulled us toward the earth, but the heaviest weight was what we carried inside. I saw Priorin barely moving his paws; his shield no longer hovered beside him but hung like a dead weight, heavy as a granite slab. I could feel it through my skin—the artifact was draining him, protesting against this cold, or perhaps against this place itself. My mind, usually operating on a frequency of cold analysis, was throwing one error after another. We were so exhausted that falling into a snowbank seemed like the most tempting outcome.
When the outlines of four towers emerged from the white haze of the blizzard, we initially took them for a hallucination. They stood at a crossroads, oriented toward the cardinal directions like giant bony fingers pointing at the sky.
In the center of the square, which the wind had miraculously swept almost clean, a strange pattern emerged on the stone. Beneath a thin layer of frost, blue lines glowed—a perfect circle from which curves radiated, resembling frozen streams of water or tentacles.
"Magic?" Flint nearly fell to his knees before the symbol, breathing heavily. He ran a palm over the blue pattern, hoping to feel even a drop of warmth.
I closed my eyes, trying to feel the threads of power. My "Function" remained silent, unable to classify the weave.
"Empty," I wheezed. "Either it’s too old, or it works on a frequency we don't yet understand. It’s not an active spell, Flint. It’s… an invitation."
Priorin and Gellia, staggering from fatigue, split up to check the towers. Three of them were icy traps, whistling from the draft like the empty flutes of giants. But the Southern tower was different. It smelled of dry wood and—what was almost impossible in this abandoned place—a total absence of dust.
Inside, we found a true luxury for exhausted travelers: benches, bundles of firewood, barrels of water, and neatly stacked sacks of grain. It was a sanctuary prepared by someone’s caring or very calculating hand.
"Checking," Gellia could barely stand, but her Paladin instinct kicked in before she collapsed. She touched the lids of the barrels, her voice trembling from the cold as she recited a prayer for poison and corruption.
I added my internal resonance to her light. The water was clean. The food—safe. No hidden threats, save for the suspicious nature of this sudden comfort.
The fire caught easily, greedily biting into the dry logs. We laid out our gear, and warmth began to slowly seep under our skin, replacing the burning cold with a pleasant ache. We ate in silence, listening to the wind raging outside, unable to break through the walls of this tower.
"Sleep," Priorin snapped, leaning his back against the wall. His hand still rested on the shield, which now flickered with a dull, anxious light in the reflections of the flames. "Tomorrow, the island will show its true face."
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I closed my eyes, feeling myself slip into a deep sleep. The last thing I remembered was the blue light of the symbol outside, which flared for a moment in sync with my breathing.
We didn't wake up to noise—we woke up because reality itself began to "vibrate" at the wrong frequency. That blue pattern on the stone, which we had considered a dead footprint of the past, suddenly took a "breath."
The lines beneath the snow came alive, filling with a toxic, pulsing light. In the center of the square, a thin vortex of greenish flame began to stretch directly from the stone. It grew contrary to the laws of physics, sucking the cold from the air and turning it into pure, primal suction. And toward this light, from all sides, from the blizzard and the darkness, shadows began to flock.
"Up!" I gasped, leaping to my feet, but my internal calculation immediately threw a red flag: Too late.
When the vortex strengthened, it became a gravitational anomaly. It pulled toward those who carried a spark. Toward magic. Toward the artifacts. Toward us. The air in the tower became sticky like hot resin and dense as lead in an instant.
Flint was the first to take flight. He was tossed into the air like a rag doll, flipped across the doorway, and hurled outside. He slammed his shoulder into Gellia—she managed to raise her sword in instinctive defense, but couldn't keep her footing. Both were dragged across the stones toward the center of the burning circle.
I tore after them. My fingers dug into the edge of Priorin’s shield, trying to find an anchor, but the shield itself was lunging toward the epicenter, resonating with the green flame. It no longer wanted to protect us—it wanted to return home, to its source. My mind, usually breaking any threat into algorithms, now simply broadcast one panicked thought:
"Logic is powerless. We are finished."
From above, as I was spun into the green torrent, I saw the true face of this crossroads. In the center of the square yawned more than just a vortex—a "throat" of a portal had opened. Spiraling around it were creatures we least expected to see together: the overgrown fungi familiar from the Bronze Bastion, the gnawed knight covered in spots of dried paint, bone beasts, and a dozen other faces my brain refused to classify for the sake of preserving my remaining sanity.
The wretches stood at the edges of the square in a chilling, silent order—like a line for a slaughterhouse—and one by one, they jumped into the vortex.
Gellia was the last to fly out of the tower. Her armor clanged against the threshold so hard that even Priorin jumped from his bedroll. He was the only one left inside, pinned to the spot either by his bestial nature or because the portal somehow didn't consider him "magical prey."
"Why isn't it pulling me?!" his clipped roar was drowned in the howl of the magical storm.
Priorin rushed to the exit. He caught a glimpse of his three companions—his "pride," his squad—swirling in the green vortex alongside ice shards and monsters. He raised his greataxe, preparing to hold the passage, but the monsters didn't care about him. They simply jumped into the well of light, vanishing into nowhere.
When the main flow of creatures dried up, the vortex "paused" for a moment. It began to slowly crawl toward the east, as if someone invisible had pulled a safety line from the other side of reality.
Priorin didn't wait. He squared his shoulders, stepped three paces back into the tower, ran, and, letting out a fierce roar, jumped directly into the pulsing green throat of the portal. Right after us.
The world turned over. Up became down, sound turned into color, and then everything snapped shut with the deafening ring of a shattered mirror.
Faurgar (Retrospective):
You know, at the moment you’re being sucked into a magical vortex in the middle of a raging island, you think very little about how you’ll describe it in your memoirs. Outside the tower windows, hell was raging—a mix of snowy elements and chaotic magical discharges. The situation didn't just look difficult; it looked final.
Any reader, had they been in our place, would have closed the book on this chapter. When paladins fall, artifacts betray, and you’re flying into the abyss in the company of bone beasts—that’s usually called "the end."
But the silence that followed Priorin’s leap was not the silence of the grave. It was a pause before a new, much stranger melody. We survived—we know that now. But then, in the green haze of the portal, we were all certain that our beat had ended forever.
The Leap into the Unknown.
Key Analysis:
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Artifact Treason: We saw the Shield of Milather actually pull Priorin toward the vortex. The artifacts aren't just tools; they are "calling home," and home might be the very center of the anomaly.
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The Gravity of Magic: Notice that the portal specifically targeted the "magical prey" (the artifacts and those touched by magic). Priorin, being the most "physical" of the group, had to choose to jump. This is a huge character moment for the Leonin—choosing the abyss over the safety of the tower to stay with his pride.
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The Parade: Seeing the Fungaloids and the Chromatic Knight again suggests that these portals are the "highways" for the monsters we’ve seen across the Forbidden Lands.
Questions for the readers:
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The Vortex: Where do you think the green portal leads? Is it a shortcut to the Island’s center, or another dimension entirely?
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Priorin's Jump: Would you have jumped after a group of people being sucked into a green vortex, or stayed in the dry tower with the firewood?
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Faurgar's Failure: How does an "Analytical Function" cope when the very laws of physics stop making sense?
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