Through
my Arts, and at great cost to my Soul, I have discovered the existence
of an
Artifact of Immense Power. It resides in
a crater far to the North of all inhabited regions.
No living race has any memory of the creation
of this crater – and indeed it is likely that no living entity
observed that
event. The Demon that I bargained with,
and that will be receiving his price for the next nine generations of
my heirs,
stated that the artifact itself created the crater when it fell out of
the sky;
and that the entire planet shook with the force of that impact.
Any attempt to Scry either results in a
blank, as if the crater does not exist (or not in this world), or else
causes a
backlash which places the Scryer into a coma for a number of days or
weeks.
Any attempt to teleport into the crater is
blocked somewhere between ten and one hundred feet from the crater
wall,
depending upon the strength of the teleport power used.
Once in the crater, it would seem that
teleportation is impossible.
Practitioners who attempt it either have no success, or else
move
nowhere but instead turn themselves inside-out: which is gory and also
fatal.
Telepathy is not impeded by whatever
defenses the crater has in place – perhaps the artifact is not
aware of that
talent, and thus does not attempt to block it.
Any attempt to fly over the crater is
reacted to by swarms of tens of thousands of diminutive insect-like
creatures,
too small to be kept out by any armor, and able by their numbers to
enable some
to penetrate the tightest and strongest arcane shields.
Individually they do very little damage, but
the damage does not stop, and every round more of them have
successfully
penetrated to the person or people flying.
The damage is immensely painful, debilitatingly so, and after a
few
rounds the flyer loses control and crashes into the crater. One flyer who turned back immediately was
followed by the swarm, resulting in the deaths of two score guards and
servants. Careful observation of the
deceased showed
that their bodies were dissolving.
Working carefully from a distance, mages pushed all the bodies
over the
edge to fall into the crater. During
that fall, additional swarms surrounded the bodies, but left after the
bodies
stopped moving. Levitation, even when
immediately next to the crater wall, causes the same appearance and
reaction
from the swarms. Whatever the type of
damage inflicted by the swarm is, it is not blocked by immunity to any
of the
five normal elements: fire, cold, acid, electricity, sound.
From a distance, the walls of the crater
appear sheer and smooth. Up close, they
are instead composed of tiny pebbles, held together by a root system. Anyone climbing down is “allowed”
to do so;
but anyone trying to climb out, or to reverse direction when partway
down, will
find that the rootlets have “let go” of the pebbles when
the climber is at a
fatal height above the crater floor. And
if they should survive the fall, their decent will attract the
above-mentioned
swarms, with guaranteed fatal results.