Aegis: Discoveries

Aegis stepped from the main door of his palace, a map in hand. He pulled his cloak up to cover his head and tied a scarf tight around his face. He stepped up to his skiff and pulled out the black cube. Slotting it into space near the front of the small hovering dingy. Lifting the sail’s mast and locking it in place. Aegis looked towards the horizon towards where he’d seen the storm begin. The project could wait, he wanted an answer for what could cause such a storm. It certainly wasn’t natural, it was pulling on the weave like a whale in a fishing net. It had made his skiff nearly malfunction several times on the trip back. And while trying to make the devices to help Mira to hear had been a struggle with how thin the weave was at the time.

He used his foot to rotate the hovering boat around and aim it at the horizon. And set out, flying over the dunes, an occasional hiccup in the magic that kept the skiff aloft, nearly sitting down completely a few times, forcing Aegis to pump more magic into the cube to keep the flight going. But eventually as he neared the nexus of the storm the ship failed and dropped into the sand.

Aegis removed the cube, and stepped down to walk the rest of the way. Glad he dressed for the occasion and wore something to cover his head. Eventually he stopped dead at the edge of an elongated crater. The sand burnt to glass, along the path of destruction. A massive meteor lay at one end. Strange mounds litter the glass, and from the right angle it looked like bodies buried in the glass. He stepped closer to the edge and looked down. He’d hoped the surface was smooth, or at least somewhat, but the surface would clearly tear him to ribbons if he even tried a descent into the crater, even if it wasn’t for the extreme heat still pouring from the glass. He tried to get a better view of the strange bubbled ripples in the glass that looked even if vaguely ‘body shaped’ but upon inspection they clearly weren’t human. Humanoid but not human, or elves, and they were too skinny to be orcs, so what were they?

A clear battle was fought here but by who? There were few mages even half strong enough to do this kind of damage. This was the destruction on level with a god, and an angry one, or by best guess based on the level of destruction. Whoever it was under the glass, the person who did this really wanted them dead, and to make sure they weren’t getting back up. Well at least Aegis hoped they were dead, because anything that could survive being cooked by the extreme level of heat to make this much glass, and being trapped under it isn’t something Aegis would want to face. He pulled his scarf off and wrapped it around his left hand, the cube in the right. He sent out a small blast breaking off a small part of the glass, using the scarf as protection to pick it up, and making the hike back to his skiff, throwing the glass in the bottom, and marking the location on the map. He’d come back when things had cooled off more. But he wanted to study this glass; he couldn’t tell what, but something was odd about it. The Return trip took him till nearly sundown, he’d had to pull the skiff through the sand quite a way before the magic reactivated and allowed flight once more. He hated being away this long, even with safeguards he needed to make sure the people under his protection were still safe.