“Come this way, seeker of knowledge.” The woman in front of you says, “We must hurry.” Flitting like a lithe shadow along the darkened maze work of endless lower rooms and corridors, she came at last to a narrow red door. Without hesitation she puts her hands on the door and it glides open before she even touched it. A single lamp, hanging from a chain lighted the room within by the door. With practised movements she draws a beeswax taper from a wicker basket, lit it from the flickering lamp, and makes her way to the round table in the centre of the room.
“Seat yourself, seeker.”
On the table, resting on a base of chased gold, sat the Vei Wia, a stone of murky crystal the size and shape of an ostrich egg, and peered into its depths. The veins in the stone were dark, like blue smoke, and turgid, like the silted waters of the River Hartia; it was, the Watchers liked to think, the smoke of possibility and the fertile thickness of opportunity.
“Wait, wait and see.” She instructs you.
Composing her thoughts as she had been taught, she closes her eyes and recites the incantation for seeing – once, and then twice more. Gradually, she felt the stone warm beneath her hands. She opens her eyes to see the smoke-tinted veins had thinned, becoming transparent wisps that seemed to writhe and dance like a sea mist fading in the sun’s first rays.
“Seeing stone,” she addresses it, “I seek knowledge of what was, what is, and what will be. My spirit is restless. Show me something…” She pauses, thinking how best to phrase the request. “Yes, show me something of the land that is condemned in wars for all eternity.”
The mists within the crystal egg swirling and coalesced into indistinct patterns. You study the shadows, brows puckered in a frown of concentration, and in a moment defined the shapes...
