My dear friends. Today has been quite an intense experience. Allow me to share it with you in the name of the Athasian Survey Project.

My pterran associate and I have traveled quite far on his trusty Pterrax. We left the western border of the Crimson Savannah behind and passed deep into the Bitterfen Salt Marshes. While nowhere near as humid as Kano Swamp or filled with an especially eerie presence, it was still a dank and hostile place. It did seem to have life, though, as we spotted a b’rohg camp on one of the hills. The glow of their campfires reflected off of the dense cloud layer hanging overhead, giving the whole landscape a washed out and dream-like feel…

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“Is that all you’ve got? My mother’s critic lizard moves faster!”

In our shared mindscape, I had grown the arms of a b’rohg, and I picked up a piece of the ground and hurled it at Chala.

Her manifestation abilities had improved since the last time we sparred. Last time she had taken the form of a watery lynx. Now she was a small water drake. Her lithe form slithered effortlessly around my flung missiles, and she writhed in my direction with blinding speed.

She laughed as she sent a blast of steam towards me. That musical laugh of hers always sounded like falling water. I dived out of the way, rolling as I had been instructed and using the motion to inspire my thought-form’s transformation. I stood up as a giant feylaar and grabbed at her horns and slippery body.

I found my grip suddenly became easier, but then her body’s volume expanded and the scales roughened, as I found myself holding onto a mother hatori, her massive teeth grinning at me. She laughed again with that musical laugh before trying to take a bite out of me.

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Since my dream travel encounter with Chala, I found my old mind drifting back again and again to my memories of her. After so many years, it felt… strange to be thinking of her again now.

My reverie was broken by Odten reaching back to touch my forearm. “Eshmel. I think we may soon have a problem.”

I looked at him, then looked down at the ground. As I had fallen into my reverie, I had failed to notice a clan of reggelids had launched an attack on the b’rohg tribe. It seemed a group of reggelid warriors were trying to harass and distract the bulk of the b’rohgs’ warriors while several of them snuck around from behind to steal the b’rohgs’ supplies.

That was when I heard the sound of thunder.

I realized I had been looking in the wrong direction. Odten wasn’t warning me about the humanoids on the ground, he was warning me about the sky! That thunderclap seemed to have caused all of the reggelids and b’rohgs below to immediately stop fighting and scramble for shelter. Those who were unable to find a hole in the ground scrambled to cover their entire bodies with heavy leather or chitin.

This was the reason the kreen rarely ever patrolled this region – acid rain! I’d only heard of this phenomenon a few times in stories from the Rain clerics of the Consortium. They saw it as an abomination, and proof of the terrible damage we had done to the world in the pursuit of power.

I could feel Odten’s panic – he’d never had to deal with anything like this before. I reached for my source with my mind while shouting at him to “Fly upwards!”

The next few moments were a horrid blur. I tried to maintain my concentration as the burning winds scratched at us, forcing myself to ignore the screaming of beast and rider. I filled the space around us with a bubble of nothing and pushed outwards, and the pain seemed to fade away as the sky grew brighter. For a terrible moment I thought this was merely my going blind from the acid rain which had reached my face.

But then there was silence. Nothing but the unusually quiet wind in our ears. Once I wiped my face with my shirt, I could see we had broken through the clouds. And we were greeted with an incredible sight, the likes of which I can imagine only a few of the most intrepid Tablelands explorers would ever get to see.

Before us in the distance lay sheer islands of stone rising far above the clouds below. I knew from the Consortium maps we had reached our westernmost destination at last. This was none other than the remote Avandaellen Plateau, far to the west of even the Thri-Kreen Empire. Its height rises so far above the Bitterfen Salt Marshes and Crimson Savannah as to leave them hidden far beneath the clouds, making the immense formation seem to float in the sky.

As you can see in my image, we had overshot our mark and were approaching the Avandaellen Plateau from its western side. If you look, you can see the ruins of a place once known as Saevendel on the far side of the plateau, an ancient elven Green Age settlement and holy site according to the Consortium’s archives. To the right you can see the Xit’Chak Plateau with its Thri-Kreen fortifications.

We made a couple of passes around a clearing not far from the southwest edge of the plateau before we maneuvered ourselves to land. We could see a few stray stone elven ruins around the area, but I could not sense any sentient life.

As Odten tended to the acid burns on his pterrax, I looked off into the horizon to the west. I was reminded how, in spite of the collective efforts of many other brave explorers, only a modest fraction of our world has actually been explored. Perhaps those of us who are able to have the strength, skills, and opportunities to explore so far away from our homes forget how few living explorers there really are on Athas. Perhaps many of us have even grown to take our special circumstances for granted…

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Chala and I reclined there together looking over the cliff edge onto the vast silt sea, letting the sun dry our sweat as our clothes lay in neat stacks off to the side. A silt storm raged in the far distance, kicking up gentle swirls into great beige cloud formations. While the silt below us was relatively calm, a fine mist still almost managed to reach the cliffs below us.

“Have you ever been to Euripis before?” she said.

I shook my head, “All I know about it is stories from my father, and what you’ve told me.”

“It is an incredible and magical place. I’m really happy you’re coming with me.”

I smiled uneasily. “I am a little nervous.”

She looked at me: “You do what you do best, use that effortless charm of yours, and I’ll try to get my mother on your side. We’ll be fine.”

“You said Euripis seldom deals with humans. He’s a water genasi high priest, one of the city’s tribunal. How is he going to react to a human son of a trader asking for permission to marry his daughter?”

Chala grinned at me: “We can do this, Eshmel. We can do this.” I could see in her eyes that she really wanted to believe that.

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Sources:
* Secrets of the Crimson Savannah manuscript.
* The Misty Sea by Yanick Moreau
* Wisdom of the Kreen by Will Kendrick

…For the inspired scholar who can identify the provenance of this image from Earth, I am able to offer you a curious box-like artifact not of my world. I have been informed that it is what Earth-dwellers would call “a full Blue-Ray set” containing children’s stories entitled “The Go-Jetters”, delivered by something they might call “The Amazon”.)