513 days after a wizard cursed the REALM…
Current Version:
Val presses onward into the strange upland REALM.
On the first day out of the Simian Pleasure Barge Marina, his skiff had sprung a leak. Just as Val was finishing up the patch, a second and third leak sprouted small geysers at his feet. Then, with a series of creaks, cracks, and gushes, entire sections of the skiff began to break apart.
In the time it took Val to desperately paddle for the riverbank, the skiff was a total loss.
“Something in the water,” the Simian observed, as the wet fur on his legs and forearms sizzled and smoked.
He spent an anxious night, nested in a bed of leaves, fully expecting to awaken with some hideous mutation, but the only lingering effects seemed were patchy fur and a general sense of nausea.
On foot through the empty landscape, Val continued to follow the river.
The water has less of a glow on the second day and even less on the third. The color goes from an unnatural green to a somewhat normal green-brown.
Val passes abandoned farmsteads and abandoned villages. The humans are gone. There are signs that surviving farm animals have spread into the woods, and additional signs that local predators are eating well.
Val fashions himself a staff from a fallen branch, just to be safe.
Parts of the land have been visibly twisted by blasts of magic. Over a rise from the river, an entire forest has been flattened except for a single flame-red maple that stands untouched in a field of ashen ash trees.
“What happened here?” Val asks.
The maple speaks no answers.
Val shrugs his broad shoulders and travels onward, hunched over in the nature of his kind, using the staff in one hand and the knuckles of his other hand to make a surer path for himself through the downed tree trunks.
“What an idiot,” thinks the maple. “Could I have been a brighter shade of red? Could I have offered a stronger warning? Could I have done anything else, as an unspeaking tree, to warn that big gorilla of the danger he’s headed into?”
The maple rustles its leaves in the breeze. “Whatever happens to him next is his own damn fault.”
Web3 Draft:
- Listed on OpenSea
- Listed on Rarible
Revision Notes:
To be added.
