Hazlan’s Latest Exciting Magic Item Crafting Trend!—Hazlan
General Summary
When you arrived in Sly-Var, something about the atmosphere made the hair on the back of your neck stand on end, and the air felt almost greasy with magical energy. The roads intersected at odd angles, and the entire city was larger and emptier than it needed to be. When you examined it, the construction seemed recent—it had deliberately been built too large to accommodate everyone who currently lived there—but you could also see that the buildings grew straight out of the ground as though they had been pulled from the earth.
You did your magic item shopping and showed the shopkeep the wooden box you were delivering to Iskander, since you still weren’t sure what it did. He started geeking out hard and asked if you had gotten it from Kourdara , who apparently had made quite the business out of crafting wooden magical items and scrolls from treant wood. She was currently just collecting as much treant wood as she could that had already been harvested, but was eventually planning to go out and get some of her own. Rose knew that there wasn’t much anyone could do with already-dead treants except use them as a form of conspicuous consumption, but if Kourdara killed a treant to use its body for magic items, she could possibly bind its spirit to some of the items in some way in order to juice the magic. The shopkeep also told you that the runes on the box were abjuration and seemed to be for protection from evil; whether it was to keep the brain contained or to be the center of a ritual where Iskander would be protected, you didn’t know.
You couldn’t put off delivering the brain in a box anymore, so you went to Iskander’s home and were taken up to his atrium laboratory. It was filled with trees and birds, but he had reshaped the birds in various ways that he found more aesthetically appealing, and when you spoke to him he was in the process of elongating and curling the wings on one of them. He did happen to have an extra copy of the Tome of Bindings that he was willing to give you as payment for the delivery, and he curtly informed you that he already had everything he needed from it and if Kourdara’s intent was to take it from him right as she gave him the tools he needed to use it, she was going to be disappointed. He made a few comments about how Preben, the book’s author, didn’t have the courage to deal with outsiders the way they should be dealt with and that was likely how he ended up the way he did. Vanya said that he hoped Iskander got the fullest experience possible out of the book.
You asked about the Great Rune, and Iskander laughed at your ignorance and took you to the top of his evil wizard tower. From there, you could see that the entire city was in the shape of a rune. Iskander informed you that Hazlik had raised the entire city from the earth in the shape of this rune for some unknown purpose; looking at the stylized eye on his wall, he said that it was surely for something amazing. You both studied the rune, and while Rose couldn’t make heads or tails of it, Vanya had been drooling over metamagic rods and could see that it was something to do with incredibly powerful metamagic; he wasn’t sure exactly what it would do to a spell channeled through it, only that it had the potential to be cataclysmic.
You left Iskander’s as quickly as humanly possible. You remembered that the trees had said the treants intended to use the rune, so Vanya speculated that since the city had been built out of magic, maybe channeling some destructive spell through the rune would be like tugging a thread and unraveling the whole thing. You didn’t know whether you would want to help the treants do that or not. You decided that you would meet the three refugees first at the standing stones and trade them the filter masks for the wand so you could take the wand to the treants as a sign of goodwill. You weren’t sure exactly where in the forest the treants were, but Sly-Var was surrounded by forests and the estate that had been destroyed was on the outskirts of the city, so you suspected you wouldn’t have to look long.
You left Julian in a decent inn, warning him that the eyes were watching him, and headed toward the standing stones to meet the refugees.
Rewards Granted
Tome of Bindings from Iskander
Related Reports
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