Greetings my dear friends. It seems I have staved off my journey to the Gray for at least a little while longer. I send you a new missive in the name of the Athasian Survey Project. But first I have some explaining to do:

As I mentioned before, the master psions of The Nexus have formidable healing talents, but even they cannot work miracles. By all rights, I should be dead right now. It is perhaps the greatest irony of my life that, given all the skills I developed over my relatively long lifetime, it should be my ability to make friends that proved my salvation.

My consciousness has been transferred to the obsidian sphere. I was told such an act is seldom undertaken for many reasons. It requires a strong enough psyche to withstand the transfer and with enough command of the Way to be able to reach out from within. It requires a carefully worked sphere of especially pure obsidian. And it requires a team of very powerful metacreators and telepaths. Even then, I was told this process nearly failed with me… until unlikely aid arrived from friends I did not know I had. A small contingent from an unnameable benefactor in Saragar provided the additional skill needed to help me complete my quest to understand what has happened with Athas since the Cerulean Storm appeared.

It is difficult to describe the state of my…existence within this sphere. When on my own, all I perceive is my own thoughts and memories. I have no senses unless I clairvoyantly reach out. So my ability to perceive the world is now bound up with choosing to visit a particular being or object. If I focus on a target, wherever on Athas they may be, I experience the world around them, and with some effort and the right applications of the Way, I can influence their journey for a time. With my perceptions and mobility limited in this way, I’ve decided to see if I can investigate some of the phenomena I’d been tasked with examining as part of my original mission.

From my druidic colleague Boanhma’s homestead near Gulg, the closest such phenomena is the Black Sands region between Silver Spring and the Windbreak Mountains.

Fortuitously, my dear druidic colleague has maintained an aerie up in the mountains above the Crescent Forest for some time now. I have secured her permission to use one of her pseudodragons to fly into the Black Sands area to do some direct investigations.

The most common and longstanding legend about the Black Sands speaks of a powerful defiler who was killed here several centuries ago, not only staining the sands with the taint of his magic, but also marking the area with a permanent psionic residue of his rage. The capricious brutality of the Black Sand Raiders has long been attributed to this legend, although I would daresay bandit gangs hardly need an excuse to be brutal and capricious. My flyover investigations of the bandit camps here didn’t reveal anything particularly unusual.

In this image, I landed among the Black Sands near a trail leading southeast into the Windbreak Mountains. Yes, the mountains are indeed often green even on this side, creating quite a striking contrast.

Oddly enough, nothing ever really seems to grow in the Black Sands. This would seem to lend credence to the defiler’s continued psychic residue, as small-scale defiling magic on its own wouldn’t do this for this long and over this wide a stretch.

I was shaken from my survey by a message brought directly to me at the Nexus from the council themselves:

———————————————————————————————

“We have spoken with the council regarding your message. We believe it is indeed a prophecy. It speaks of many things that few in this world would know about. One of our own knows of someone who might be able to interpret this prophecy. There is a very ancient being not of this world, one who travels across the lands trading with a select few. We have been led to believe he is based in Bodach, and would like you to contact him there within the next fortnight…”

———————————————————————————————

…Interesting. Well, there is nothing left to lose. I’m now committed, body and soul, to my cause.

Until next time, may the moons guide you.

(Whoever can guess where this photo comes from can have some black sand. I’ve been told it resembles the appearance and texture of something people on Earth would call ‘kitty litter’…)