On the other side of the teleportation portal, Wiliken was met with the splendor of the Shining Kingdom of old. He’d heard some of his allies speak of the Felshore having been transported through time just at the moment of its destruction, but the githzerai hadn’t believed it. In the years since the destruction, he’d heard songs where the good people of the Shining City were spirited away from some god or other just before everything was obliterated. He’d never imagine that he’d see the place with his very own eyes. In that moment, Wiliken felt that he could put down the burden he’d carried for all those years, that he could be forgiven for his hidden sin.

In the moment that followed, the githzerai was captured by a motley group of soldiers in mismatched armor and dragged off.

In the holding cell they’d fashioned for Wiliken, the githzerai spent all of a week in a rage. He raged about his wife, who would be in harm’s way without their intervention. When his guards had begun to fear for their own safety, Douglas had showed up to explain that they didn’t have any means of communication with the outside world, that the normal methods would attract the wrong kind of attention to a city that is not supposed to exist. He further explained that the only mode of transportation was teleportation, and that all requests had to go through the wizard Jenkins. Every word that came from the human’s mouth sounded like a lie to Wiliken, and he raged thinking that Douglas enjoyed the githzerai’s misfortune.

Slowly, the githzerai was able to keep his anger in check. Sense suggested that his wife was not in very much danger. His father-in-law was a very influential man. As such, anything that happened to Wiliken’s wife would call down the terrible justice of the empire. Furthermore, while Wiliken’s own son was clearly a dangerous adversary, the githzerai could not imagine that the boy would kill his own mother…

With these calming thoughts, Wiliken was able to turn to meditation, spending the next few weeks doing little other than sitting cross-legged in a state of keen focus. He meditated on the recent past, on the ways in which his recklessness had nearly killed him and his one-time friends. In time, his thoughts drifted to the present and there they remained, until the object of his thoughts was a small sliver of a moment.

There had been rumors that someone adept at meditation could gain extraordinary powers. Wiliken had seen monks move objects, not with arcane rituals or devices, but strictly through the exercise of their own minds. With his focus turned inward to his own mind, he began to feel the boundaries of his consciousness expanding. At first, he felt a great existential fear of this expansion, but in time even this subsided.

After six weeks in a makeshift prison, Wiliken found peace. It was short-lived.

Campaign Stories continues in Wiliken 15.