The Hunt! (Date 1/10/17)

Euwyn zoomed low over the rooftops struggling not to lose his nimble quarry as it scampered in an out of sight. Having left his guardian and his healer behind him on the castle walls, he could only hope that somewhere above him Ilyana still followed in her elemental form, but adrenaline fueled the chase. Her druidic magic had caused the monster to glow green making it easy to track as long as one could fly. And Euwyn could fly! The wind against his face felt amazing, and despite the obvious danger, he felt alive! More alive than days shut in the tower… Days carrying the weight of the kingdom… Here he didn’t have to balance responsibility and his desires. Here he didn’t need to worry about loneliness as he felt his childhood friends slipping away as they continued to grow into very different adults. Here he wasn’t the prince. He was Euwyn the Wizard, master of magic and defender of the kingdom!

Ahead his quarry, realizing he could not lose the faster mage, dropped through a window, shattering shutters in a splintered shower. A scream followed and Euwyn plunged in after. A girl cringed terrified in her bed as dim light flickered in through the open window and a single door which stood ajar. Darting into the hall, Euwyn’s arm went numb and dropped limply to his side. Cornered, the beast had ceased running and bared its teeth! Without a thought magic burst from Euwyn’s fingers showering the creature in a rainbow of light meant to render the monster unconscious. Instead, it merely staggered back shaking it lupine snout, trying to clear its eyes. This beast was far more powerful than Euwyn had surmised! Suddenly everything came crashing down on him. He wasn’t some foolhardy adventurer who could so blatantly risk his life this way! He was the Prince of the kingdom. He had responsibilities, to his subjects, to his father, to Malwan. And here he was standing alone in a tight hallway with a beast half-again as tall as he and one nearly immune to his spells. The girl screamed again and Euwyn seized the distraction to spur his frozen limbs to action. Reversing his course, he snatched the terrified girl from her bed and flew her out the sundered window to safety.

Later the group gathered at the city wall. Ilyana had taken up the chase Euwyn had abandoned and followed the creature up and over the wall. As she pursued it toward a nearby stand of trees, a powerful blast of frost exploded around the druid nearly freezing even her air-form solid. The spell had seemed to come from a larger air elemental, hiding in the trees and working in concert with the hairy monster. The group tracked the pair to a glade where it seemed to vanish. Later Ilyana questioned the trees who blamed the frost on their branches on an elven woman, much like herself, who had appeared from nowhere before gathering up the wounded monster and flying away.

Then Euwyn had an idea. He had found a spell in his voluminous tomes which would let him transfer his consciousness into another body. Using this, he theorized they could wake the doll, Lunette, and use her ability to bypass the shield archon to gain access to the upper floor of Narlock’s tower. It worked! In addition to a stately and well-preserved master bedroom, the floor contained Narlock’s primary laboratory. The principle piece was what looked to be a giant made from metal, with tangled gears and clockwork springs inside. It had met a violent end, and Narlock looked to have been in the process of dismantling the thing when he was last here. Among the notes were schematics for a large, underwater vessel. Euwyn also managed to ferry down several incomplete magic items before the spell wore off. But in all, the true gem of his quest, had to be a familiar looking tome. With similar binding to the three already in his collection, this book had to contain a fourth tier of magic!