• Closed • The Phoenix's Nest

[Tio Silver]

Faldrass
33rd Saun, 717

Ever since he’d been old enough to understand the concept of it, Tio had wanted to cheat death.

It was, in his eyes, a fair enough sentiment to have. The Immortals got to enjoy immortality after all, so why couldn’t mortals like him break the bonds of mortality and live forever as well? It was that admittedly dark line of thinking that’d gotten him into trouble a number of times before, such as when he’d almost died at the hands of a skeleton while being initiated into necromancy, or when he’d fallen from a height that should’ve killed him whilst looking for the fountain of youth, but no matter how many close calls it had led him into Tio still refused to give up on his dream. What was one trial of life-threatening danger compared to the possibility of gaining an infinite lifespan after all?

So when skanky looking street vendor had tried to sell him a stone he claimed would bring him back from death a few trials ago, Tio had been intrigued. Not by the actual stone the vendor was trying to sell to him of course, he wasn’t stupid enough to believe that anyone who genuinely found something that could give them a second chance at life would sell it to random passer-by, but by the name; A Phoenix Stone. The vendor had spoken of it as if he should’ve already known what it was, and after turning the guy down Tio had made some inquiries to a few locals and discovered that quite a few of them had heard the name before.

It was something of a local legend; a stone which held the flames of a phoenix, and would not only revive any recently departed person who held it but restore their body to the time when it was at its peak. An old man clutching it as they passed away in their sleep would awaken in the prime of their youth, and an amputee would find their missing limbs regrown and strong again. Most people believed them to be myths of course, but there were a few natives who swore that the stones truly were real, and recounted to him old local tales of past heroes who’d sought the stones and been rewarded by their power. The only drawback was that in all the tales the Phoenix Stones only worked once, losing the fire inside them after saving their intended life.

Even if they only worked once the idea of such a stone fascinated Tio. If he could find one it may not grant him eternal life, but it could give him a whole other lifetime to keep searching for another way to reach it. Heck if he found a number of them he might be able to prolong his lifespan indefinitely! Sure there was a high possibility that they weren’t real, but what if they were? Wasn’t it better to search for something and find that it didn’t exist than do nothing and spend the rest of his life wondering? The chance at a get-out-of-death free card was worth taking risks for.

And so he’d hit the library in the Scalvoris University and poured through any books on the subject he could find. There weren’t many of them of course, and most of the one’s he could find were just conjectures on how the myth of them must have evolved from old stories told about the Rainbow Stones, but a few of them held half-credible theories on how they might work and vague descriptions of what they looked like.

It was in one of these book, a dusty old thing with frayed edges (because honestly, what important books about mystical artefacts didn’t look like they’d been rotting for the last thousand arcs?) that Tio had found something interesting. Someone had scribbled down a long list of notes over one of the pages, notes that told of one such Phoenix Stone somewhere in the caves around the volcano in Faldrass. The handwriting was hard to read and occasionally didn’t make sense, as if it had been written by a madman, but from what he could make out the writing described a pathway through the caves that would lead him to it.

Which led him to where he was now; standing at the foot of a volcano and clutching a torn page covered in a madman’s scribbled directions with every intention of following them into it. Since it seemed kind of obvious that a volcano would be hot Tio was wearing his standard short-sleeved clothing with his chainmail vest over his shirt, and had his cutlass, pistol crossbow and bolts strapped to his belt. His dagger, full water-skin and fetch type thrall Raton were tucked inside his inner jacket pocket, where he could get back to them easily, and his spelunking kit and other camping equipment (minus the tent, fishing gear and trapping equipment) were packed inside his backpack, with the bones and hat that comprised of his other thrall Risas dangling off the back in a separate rucksack.

“Right, into the fiery bowls of the underworld I go. Can’t see how this could possibly go wrong.” He muttered to himself cheerfully, hoping that the self-encouragement might somehow help dismiss the naggling doubts in the back of his mind. With a forced spring in his step he set off on the path before him leading up the volcano, heading to the entrance described in his notes.

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[Pegasus]

It did, indeed, seem rather obvious that the volcano would be hot. But then, there was knowing it was hot and standing at the foot of a volcano, in Saun in a chainmail vest. Really, short sleeves weren't cutting it and Tio had to know that he was likely to pass out from heat exhaustion or... suffer tremendously if he insisted on wearing thick metal armour whilst there were two suns in the sky whilst exploring an active volcano.

The entrance which had been described in the piece of paper which he now clutched told of a hidden cave. Where there were three rocks converging against a tree, five steps to the north from there, he would find the entrance to the Cave of Wonder (yes, that is what it was called) hidden behind a "mee-maw" bush. What one of those was, of course, he might not know.

However, the issue he had was that there wasn't really anywhere where there were three rocks converging against a tree. There were a few trees, none of which were five steps away from the two cave entrances which he could see. Of course, since the entrance to the "Cave of Wonder" was supposed to be hidden, it wasn't likely to be either of those, was it?

So. He had four trees, no rocks, two entrances (left and right, for want of a better term for them) and the scribbling of a mad man. Oh, and he was hot. Like, beyond normal ability to deal with it hot. The pack at his back was laden down, heavy and hot. The short sleeved shirt did little to mitigate against the sweltering heat or weight of the chain armour he wore.

All in all, he was downright uncomfortable and he hadn't started yet.

Beautiful, brightly plumaged birds circled overhead and called to each other, apparently mocking the poor mortal below. There were the sounds of the creatures around the place and, of course, this being Faldrass, he could be sure that there were beautiful people close by. However, he still had two entrances, four trees and no rocks.

Which left him with three choices. Left, right or search further?

[Tio Silver]

The chainmail had been a bad idea, a really bad idea. Tio had expected the area around a volcano to be hot but he'd never actually been this close to one before, and now that he was beside one he realised that he'd severely underestimated how hot a pool of lava could be. Heat of this level was something that a person couldn't really comprehend until they'd felt it for themselves. How on earth did the Aukari manage to survive living near that volcano they'd built their city around? Clearly their worship of old firepants had made them a bit tougher when it came to stuff like this.

Tio stripped off his chainmail before it became hot enough to burn his skin and packed it away in his backpack along with his jacket, leaving his torso covered only by his vest. It was uncomfortable leaving himself this unprotected in a place that was bound to have something dangerous lurking about, but it would be more uncomfortable, if not fatal, to let himself keep roasting away as he had been. He moved the waterskin that'd been in his jacket pocket to the side of his belt since he was sure to need ready access to it in the near future, but put Raton away in the backpack as well. With luck he wouldn't run into anything that'd require his little fetch anyway.

He had barely even begun his journey when the first of his problems presented itself; the entrance to the Cave of Wonder was nowhere to be seen. Though he was supposed to be looking for a tree with three rocks converging on it nothing he could see fit that description, and neither of the two cave entrances he could see were hidden by any kind of bush, let alone a 'Mee-maw'. What was a Mee-maw bush anyway? A bush that somehow blended in perfectly with the rocky terrain, or a figment of a madman's imagination?

Perhaps the rocks that'd been converging on the tree had been moved for some reason? Maybe someone wanted them to build something nearby, or sought to thwart people like him using them as a landmark to map a way to the Cave of Wonder? Both were highly implausible theories for a number of reasons, but with all the crazy stuff that happened around the world on a daily basis it sometimes seemed better to just accept things as they came than think too hard as to how or why they happened. Tio went over to examine the two trees in the hopes of spotting any kind of sign that there had once been rocks nearby them, even if they weren't their now. If there was nothing however Tio decided to keep search further, after all the notes claimed that the first thing he needed to do was find this exact entrance and without it the rest of the notes would be useless.

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[Pegasus]

Tio decided that, when in doubt, one should follow the scribblings of a mad mad man. Whoever it was that had written this stuff about the Cave of Wonder and the Mee-Maw bush might well have once been on his rocker, but surely by now Tio was considering that he was, in fact, off it. But Tio persevered and he kept going too!

This turned out to be a good thing. Maybe.

Continued examination led him nowhere, at first.There were no more trees than he had seen and there were no more rocks than he'd seen.But he searched and he searched again. And then, maybe, he realised something. Maybe. The thing was, he was looking off to the side of where he'd been examining and there was a tree. With three rocks leaning against it. But it was tiny, not a half foot tall. It was a small, delicate looking tree the like of which was found on Faldrass. Perfect in proportion and with tiny leaves. Three small pebbles were arranged at its base, just like the description in the book.

It was a tree. They were rocks.

If Tio looked, though, not only that was true, but it was about five steps away from what seemed to be a very solid bit of the volcano, not a cave entrance at all. Close examination, however, led to a very similarly sized bush, tiny but perfectly in proportion which had, of all things, a small indentation hidden behind it. It was like a sort of button to press for a secret door! Surely that must be it!

Should Tio press it, then he would wait with baited breath and then, he'd be force to bate no more. Because, whilst the button slid in, like a release for a secret door, when he pressed it nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

[Tio Silver]

After a frustratingly long search, made all the worse by the inescapable boiling heat and the mocking cried of the birds circling up above him, Tio at last found the tree he'd been looking for. The tree however was not at all like he'd expected it to be: it was tiny, no bigger than a twig really, with leaves the size of grains of sand. If he plucked it from the ground he could fit it in the palm of his hand, and indeed Tio entertained the thought of doing so for a while. Someone around down was sure to pay a good price for a miniature tree, after all they weren't exactly commonplace items.

But after a moments consideration Tio decided against it. It was only going to get hotter and more fiery where he was going, and wood had a bad tendency to be flammable. Better to come back for it later if he was able than risk it getting burnt to cinders. Besides he might end up needing to come back again, and the tiny tree was the only marker around with which to find the cave.

Speaking of the cave the person who'd wrote the map had either been an exceptionally small Tunawa or, as was seeming ever more likely, bonkers, because the only thing he found behind the equally tiny 'mee-maw' bush with an indentation behind it about the size of his finger. There was no way he was fitting in that, in fact there was no way he could imagine any creature bigger than a worm getting into it. The fact that the tree and bush did actually exist had given him a bit of hope that the trail he was following wasn't just a madman's delusions after all, but the tiny scale of them proven he'd been wrong to get his hopes up. Would it have been so much trouble to write "small tree with three rocks?"

"Damn it whoever wrote this, if it turns out you're some psycho I'm going to be so pissed." He muttered absently to himself while considering his next move. "Couldn't you have written clearer instruction? Or even a name? I bet you've got a really stupid one, like Pablo or something."

As he still had no other leads to go on Tio eventually decided that the only real option he had here was to stick his finger into the indentation and hope that it did something, and when he did so discovered that it moved to his touch like a button. But after that... nothing. It didn't do anything, or anything that he could see at least.

Tio grit his teeth in frustration and forced himself to take deep, slow breaths. It would all be worth it, he told himself, when he found the stone. He could put up with irritatingly vague notes and tiny trees for the sake of a Phoenix Stone, he just needed to be patient. Really patient.

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[Pegasus]

Tio was growing frustrated. Maybe overly so or, in fairness, perhaps reasonably. He had found a tree with the requisite number of rocks and he had even found a button to press which should, if all was fair in the world, have released a secret door. Yet nothing had happened. Nothing at all. Not a damn thing. That was not how it was supposed to go and in the stories and songs which were told of this glorious trial, surely the patience of Our Hero would be emphasised here.

So, Tio was patient. In his patience, he looked around and, as luck would have it, a slight flickering caught his eye. Not on the mountainside, nope. But over towards one of the trees he had looked at earlier. Assuming that Tio went over to look, he would see that either the pressing the button had caused this door to slide open in the tree via some strange and obviously silent method, or by sheer coincidence. It was probably the first.

But, there it was, on the side of the tree there was a door. The mechanism, if Tio stopped to look, meant that the door had slid open, sliding in and then behind the hollowed-out trunk. Inside the doorway was a room, a hollowed out inside of a tree sized room but really there was only one thing in that room.

Stairs down.

Curling downwards there were spiral stairs. They descended into pitch darkness and Tio couldn't see the bottom. So, he'd pressed the button, a door in a tree trunk had slid open and there were stairs spiralling down. Hmmm. Not at all odd. Would he go down into the darkness? If so, would he prepare in any way? It seemed to be something of a leap of faith, after all.

[Tio Silver]

Oh this had been worth it! The waiting had been worth it and then some!

These were the thoughts running through Tio's head, accompanied by a surge of pure delight, as he discovered that his meddling with the indentation had caused a doorway to slide open in the nearby tree-trunk. There was a hidden stairway in the tree-trunk! That was so cool! Hidden stairways were the stuff of stories, the sort of thing that lead down to massive hordes of treasure or the secret labs of crazy wizards! Was he going to find a crazy wizards waiting for him beneath the volcano? That would be awesome! Terrifying and absolutely dangerous, but awesome!

In was then an there that Tio made a promise to himself; if he ever became a great and powerful magician he was going to build a secret lab with a hidden stairwell just like this one, so that one day in the far off future someone else could experience the joy of discovering one.

With a spring in step and absolutely no preparation whatsoever Tio quite literally leaped down the stairs, bounding over the first few steps without a care, and happily plunged himself into the waiting darkness. It definitely wasn't clever to be heading down stairs in such poor visibility with such gusto, he knew that, but he didn't care: things were getting exciting!

Down and down he went, following the stairs deeper into the earth until the bright sunlight was completely gone. It was only then, when he couldn't see his own hands in front of him, that Tio realized if he was going to continue he'd need to be able to see, and stopped to fish his tinderbox and a torch out of his spelunking kit.

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[Pegasus]

And so, down the stairs into the darkness he went. Spiralling round and round, getting darker and darker and more and more treacherous as he descended deeper and deeper.

It was a bit like a viscous circle, descending into spiraling darkness. Except, you know, stairs.

Anyhow, our erstwhile and cheery adventurer was not to be put off by such small things as a deep foreboding or some spooky stairs. No, he was seeking out the elusive Phoenix Stone and that meant that he must be without fear! Tio leaped down the stairs and, eventually, lit a torch as the blackness enveloped him.

And down and down he went. Tio must realise fairly swiftly that he was far below the ground level, presumably descending amidst the gnarled roots of the tree he was inside. The torch flickered down and down until, eventually, the stairs led Tio to a room. As he stepped down the spiralling stairs, he saw in the circumference of light and looming shadows, what could only really be described as a lab. It was a large, roughly circular room. There were floor to ceiling bookshelves around half of it. Although they were not full, they were far from empty. There was a large carved stone "desk" and smaller wooden tables. On the large stone desk (which was so long that Tio could lay on it twice over) was a variety of strange looking equipment. All of it was covered in the dust of centuries, not seeming to have been moved for a very, very long time. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and between glass beakers and flasks. Some of those flasks were broken, apparently having just shattered and spilled their contents. Others were still filled with unusual coloured liquids.

Lots to see. Lots to explore. There were small closed wooden boxes scattered around, some so small that they fitted on the bookshelves, others as large as treasure chests. Books, equipment and that continuing sense of there being something in the shadows. Just.... just outside the sphere of light, just on the edge of his vision.

[Tio Silver]

Down and down he went, spiraling deeper into the bowels of the earth with only a torch for light, until at last Tio reached the end of the stairs. At the bottom of them was an entrance to a room, and as he stepped inside it the smell of dust and old wood hit him like a slap to the face.

The torchlight illuminated some of the room around him, revealing to his delight that it was exactly what he'd been hoping it would be; a secret laboratory! Vials and beakers containing strange substances were littered about the place, along with old books and a ton of equipment he didn't recognise. Everything seemed to be covered in dust, suggesting that the lab had been abandoned for a very long time. What exactly had this lab been researching that required it to be hidden beneath the foot of a volcano? Perhaps he should look around for clues? After all anything important enough to warrant its own secret lab must be pretty damn cool.

Deciding to explore a bit, Tio headed over to the bookcase first and picked up any books that stood out from the rest, flicking them open to pages that'd been bookmarked or else just randomly and seeing what they were about. He briefly considered drinking the contents of one of the vials just to see if anything would happen, but the sensible part of him quickly dispelled that idea with a memory of one of his fellow alchemy students at the university who'd brewed an amateurish potion and had spent the next season laying eggs. Drinking unknown chemicals was never a good idea, no matter how cool the laboratory they were found in was.

He then tried rummaging around a couple of the big wooden boxes about the place, again looking for anything that stood out as somehow special or important to the laboratory experiments.

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[Pegasus]

Starting with the book shelves Tio, probably wisely, decided to explore the place.There were a number of books with scraggly bits of parchment sticking out of them ~ no folded down corners, though, which was a good sign in all probability. Many of the texts were very old and when Tio lifted the first one it literally crumbled to dust beneath his fingertips. Further investigation, however, showed him that the majority of the texts were no so old as to simply disappear from existence but, in fact, were perfectly readable.

In one way, they were a very strange mish-mash of subjects. There were books on alchemy, chemistry, medicine, legends, history, beasts and creatures of land and sea. Yet, when Tio took a moment to study them in more detail, it seemed that he had come across the laboratory of someone who was very interested in life. Life, death, animation, that kind of thing. As a necromancer, he recognised it more quickly, probably, than someone else might. But as he looked at the books, of course, it was only a theory.

After the books, Tio made his way to the boxes, crates and chests and there he really would be sure that what he had suspected from the books was true. In those were larger jars, containing experiments which had gone wrong - or right. Pieces of bodies, floating in strange substances. Bits of flesh, tested upon and then preserved for posterity. One chest contained a lot of books, but these were different. They were journals of the experiments done here.

The previous owner (judging by the date, this place had been empty for at least 80 arcs), had been fascinated by death. A doctor and a necromancer, they had sought a way to ensure that they could live, prolong life and more than that, prolong youth. As luck would have it, as Tio opened the first of those journals which came to hand, he noticed that the journal had stopped there. Maybe it was the last entry. Either way, it said the following:

3rd Zi'da 652

Can it be that I have spent all these arcs chasing youth, only to find it? If this is a phoenix stone which I possess, then I am aghast. The difference, the transformation is immense. It must be. I had given up on this as a legend only, yet here, in the very mirror, it proves me wrong. I will leave this place, lest anyone find me and seek to take away my secret. To think that it was there, right in front of me all these arcs. If only the people of Scalvoris knew! I must leave here, hoarding the information to myself and ensuring that no one else ever finds it. These experiments, all these arcs, they have been for naught but what care I? I have my time over again. And again after that.

Eternity is mine to command! I, Xavier VonDwight, will live forever. For this trial. For all the trials to come.

Well, that seemed pretty clear.[/align]