Adventure Returns - Astire

The crystal sent a shiver of excitement through Astire's body with every step she took.  It had been an unfamiliar feeling at first, a heady, youthful excitement that she barely remembered ever feeling before, but it had quickly grown on her, and there was a part of her that wished it didn't have to end, that this journey wouldn't end.

The crystal had guided her off the shores of Etera, out across the ocean, and for a time she'd wondered if she would have to dive underwater, if her goal was deep beneath the waves.  But the pulsing of the crystal had grown stronger as she'd approached a small archipelago, a beautiful set of islands that could have come from some fantastical painting.  But as picturesque as her surroundings were, whether it was the pulsing of the crystal or some inner instinct, something just felt…wrong.

She landed on the shore – and stepped back in shock as the sand turned into an oily sludge that her feet sank into, stumbling and pulling herself free with a beat of her wings, looking down on the dark stain on the otherwise-pristine sandy beach.

Was it the crystal's doing?  This place wasn't that far from Etera, there was no way she could be the first to find it, and such a threat would've been reported.

Unless no-one who found this island had ever before survived.

The sea below her changed with a screeching of metal into a hail of knives and daggers, crashing and slashing into the oily pool of the beach and sinking away, only to surge up again with the next wave, and she flew forwards, away from the ocean and the beach, and the shifting landscape outpaced her no matter how fast she flew.

Boulders grew great maws and wicked teeth of diamond to clamp down on her, coconuts bulged and split with scalding acid, flowers sprayed her with soporific pollen, vines lashed like wild things around her arms, legs, wings, *neck* as the corruption of the crystal spread further and further, the twisted artifact reacting to the proximity of the treasure.

She grabbed one of the boulders and threw it with a yell into the vines that had formed a barrier in front of her, and the ground quaked below her as the impact tore down the vines and the boulder gathered momentum and ploughed through a tree, and the tree split and *twisted* into half-formed mockeries of humanoid shapes that hurled themselves at her in utter silence as the boulder turned and rolled uphill towards her.

There was nothing living in this place.  Was this what had happened to the Ghostlands, on a smaller, far more condensed scale? Had the people who'd once lived there had the time to be afraid as its inimical aura washed over them?  How many innocents were there within the Ghostlands who couldn't rest thanks to its cruelty?

She flew over the boulder as it leapt, growing stalagmites and stalactites like a clawed hand trying to grasp at her, and it crashed through the flowers and was torn apart by the vines, and the pieces became weapons that it the vines hurled at her with sinuous flicks.

Barely a year ago she wouldn't have lasted two seconds in such a malevolent place.

The island wasn't the only thing to have changed.

The treasure was in the island's centre, within the mountain that towered over the scenery.  The change had got there first, and jet-black lava lapped at the rim of the mountain in a way that seemed unnervingly like some great beast licking its lips.

Astire flew high, almost into the clouds before she turned and let herself plummet towards the island once again drawing her sword as she fell as the clouds crackled with lightning as the crystal's power brushed against them.

*Ancestors guide me.*

The lava swallowed her greedily, but the fire didn't harm her, and the malevolent, necrotic force recoiled, exposed to her energies without the island's protection, and the crystal around her neck *tugged* more than pulsed, bodily pulling her towards the treasure.

And there it was. An old, rusted chest, wood and metal standing impossibly in the centre of the volcano, and the pull of the crystal was stronger now, strong enough that Astire couldn't have held it back if she'd wanted to –

And then it touched the lock of the chest and reality *shifted*, and suddenly it wasn't lava she was submerged in any more but water, and she erupted from the caldera with the chest with a few powerful beats of her wings, and landed, and looked down at the island.

No doubt other explorers would come here and wonder at the carnage, wonder what kind of malevolent force had torn apart trees and boulders and rained foul poison on the plants.

Would any of them even believe her if she told her story?