Into the Mirror 10 Shatter + Into the Mirror 11 Mortaurios

Part 1

Part 2

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This chapter of the Into the Mirror saga opens moments after the worst thing that could happen in The Sands of Eternity: Locket has crumbled to sand in Flynry’s arms, killed by an arrow through the throat. Toddleheim nearly loses himself to his werewolf form, and Elianna the librarian discovers she can slit throats. Then the party comes face to face with Cerys, the stranger who fired that arrow. By the end, the grieving party has passed through a whispered portal into the city of the dead, Mortaurios, and stands before the thrones of its rulers.

The Story

Shatter

The episode begins under the celestial sky of the desert. Flynry kneels with his hands held out, empty. Locket has just evaporated into sand, minutes after he found her again. The shock comes first. Then comes the weight of all the years he has spent in this place, which “has done nothing but take, take, take” from him for what feels like an eon. As the last grains slip through his fingers, he roars at the sky like a beast, and his body partly shifts as his more primitive roots from the real world surface.

Elianna drops to her knees and scoops Locket’s sand into the little bag at her side. “Maybe we can put her back together.” The sword “took her,” so she hurls handfuls of sand at Flynry’s blade in case that does anything. It doesn’t.

Flynry’s cry echoes in Toddleheim’s chest, and the wizard begins to change. His hair lengthens, his jaw and snout stretch, and he cries the whole time. Elianna scrambles away: “What the fuck is that?” Flynry sees the bones shifting and the terror on her face. He runs to Toddleheim and wraps him in a tight embrace, part restraint and part love. Toddleheim’s knees bend backwards and his voice warps: “They took her. I can’t believe things are gone.” The hug slows the change, but it doesn’t stop it.

The Mirror and the Werewolf

Toddleheim is the only one who has never looked into Flynry’s sword, a greatsword with a mirror surface that shows a person’s true inner self. Flynry draws it and plants it in the sand facing his friend. In the reflection, Toddleheim does not see the younger body a magic item gave him, or the beast clawing its way out. He sees the old, wise wizard who has done everything he set out to do, content and happy.

The reflection flickers between that inner self and his real form. Then a mirage of Locket lays her hand on his shoulder. Having seen his inner truth, Toddleheim finds he can control the change, and he chooses not to transform. His bones crunch back into place, and, still crying, he hugs Flynry back. He only half understands what happened, but he grasps this much: in this place, how you look “might be up to you.”

Elianna, meanwhile, has no idea what she just witnessed. Nobody explains, so she writes it in her notebook. Flynry summed it up for her:

“She watched a werewolf almost kill her, look into a mirror, and now two men are hugging.” — Flynry

Moments Earlier, Over the Dune

The story then rewinds to the moments before Locket died, and to a stranger on the far side of the next dune. Cerys is an Aasimar about six feet tall, ethereal, with grayish skin and long blue hair tied back. She wears tattered, dulled heavy armor over blue robes, and her face is worn and unsmiling, “jaded by this place.”

Four outlanders surround her. One rips away her shield and another pulls her sword from her hand. When she dives for a hand crossbow, a blade slashes across her back. She tries again, and an archer puts an arrow through her wrist. They are toying with her. The archer laughs, throws his heavy bow at her feet with a single arrow, and says, “Go ahead, take your shot.”

“Is this a game to you?” she asks.

“We’ve got nothing else to do. Nothing but time here. Why not have a little fun?”

One of them flares his arms wide and offers himself as a target. Enraged, Cerys lets the divine light inside her burst out, and it blazes over all of them as she cries out in battle fury. She lets fate choose her target, and it picks the man with his arms spread. As she draws the heavy bow, a spear stabs through the back of her leg. The arrow sails high over his head and over the next dune, and it finds Locket’s throat. The spear is pulled out, and Cerys bleeds into the sand on her knees. At the table, the player behind both women realized she had just killed her own character.

Blood on the Dunes

Back in the present, Toddleheim remembers a scream just before Locket fell, and now he hears raw laughter over the next rise. The arrow that killed Locket still lies at Flynry’s feet. Unlike her, it did not turn to sand. At the crest of the dune, Flynry spots a Tabaxi with hand crossbows and a glowing Aasimar kneeling beside exactly the kind of heavy bow that fired the shot. He makes a beeline for her. The archer sees him coming (“Well, it looks like we’ve got some entertainment for the evening”), snatches his bow back and aims it at Flynry. Toddleheim is right on Flynry’s heels, and Elianna clutches her pen and book and runs after them, because she does not want to be left alone.

A javelin flies at Flynry. With his new cool calm, he steps aside without breaking eye contact, and the javelin flies past Toddleheim’s face. It also misses Elianna, who was standing right behind Toddleheim, because, as she learned, Toddleheim is a dwarf here. Elianna flips her book open to the first spell she sees and puts three of the attackers to sleep. The archer shrugs it off. So does Cerys, who stands, still glowing, takes up her longsword and cuts deep into him with searing light.

Flynry is confused, since these two clearly aren’t on the same side. But Toddleheim is “his best friend, number one”: if this is who they’re attacking, “this is who we’re fucking attacking.” He throws the archer’s bow away, knocks him to his knees and takes his head off with the greatsword. The head rolls down the dune and the body turns to sand, just as Locket’s did.

Then the librarian gets to work. Elianna has never been trained with a weapon. She takes the smallest dagger from a sleeping outlander in purple, whispers a prayer, and slits his throat. His eyes snap open as he gurgles blood up at her and dissolves. “Well, there’s two more left.” She gives the sleeping Tabaxi “a nice little farewell prayer” and does the same, then looks to Flynry: “Eh?” He nods. At the table, the verdict was swift: “Our librarian’s a sociopath.” Cerys takes the last one. “Oh, I’ve been waiting for you,” she tells the sleeping spearman, and drives her sword through his chest.

The Woman Who Fired the Arrow

Flynry looks hard at the stranger, wondering if she could somehow be Locket. He feels no recognition at all. Cerys sheathes her blade and laughs: “You don’t look like outlanders… You’re not from here? From the city?” Flynry insists there are no cities here, and she takes that as proof that there is.

Then Flynry raises his sword: “Which one shot the arrow over the ridge? Tell me now.” Elianna throws herself between them. Cerys knows of a city with a pyramid and a crystal, the very place Elianna once glimpsed through the sword, and it may be their only way out. “I am no prisoner,” Cerys says. “You could be a corpse instead,” Flynry answers, and blue flame engulfs his blade. Toddleheim, in full werewolf form, looms beside him. Cerys cracks her neck: “I’m not afraid of you.”

She explains the setup, and Flynry is unmoved: “My companion who you shot through the throat, despite your troubles, despite your pain, her death is yours.” Cerys apologizes and says she meant to kill one of them. Flynry turns his back and walks away, and she gives the others her name. Toddleheim walks right up to her face, drooling and enormous, says “I don’t care who you are,” and walks off, shrinking back to himself as he goes.

To Elianna, Cerys explains that she has also watched people she grew close to turn to sand and float away, and she wants vengeance on whoever made this place. The way to the city is to speak its name into the wind. Elianna makes her write it down so she can’t slip away alone. Flynry, petty but listening, turns his back so that the sword strapped to it faces Cerys. In the mirror, Toddleheim sees her inner self: angelic and radiant, bright-eyed, with white wings. “I think we can trust her,” he decides. “At the very least, I’ll just get Elianna home.”

Cerys blows sand from her palm and whispers the name. The whisper echoes across an infinite distance, and the sand swirls into a portal that first shows their own reflections. Then it shows a walled city and a massive ziggurat crowned with a crystal beaming light into the sky. In a blink they are through.

Mortaurios

The city sits on a trapezoidal platform miles wide, with a second, colossal ziggurat rising from its center. Elianna holds up her old sketch: “Well, she wasn’t lying. This is the place.” Cerys was brought here once by someone else from the city, but she has never been inside the ziggurat.

As they walk, the party compares notes. Cerys came from a part of The Void, the amalgamation of lost worlds around The Dread Fortress, “a long time ago,” and she was killed to end up here. So were they. “If you die here, there is no coming back,” she warns. “You become sand.” Flynry answers that they are no strangers to loss. Toddleheim gives his verdict: “She’s all right. I don’t like her, but she’s all right.”

Mortaurios is a dusty, bustling metropolis of tents, bazaars and paved streets, crowded with thousands of people. After years of wandering, Flynry finds it almost unfathomable, and oddly mundane. Nothing here is made of living sand, which makes him uncomfortable. The currency, Cerys recalls, is mostly soul gems: fragments of souls left in the sand where people died, rumored to still hold those souls. Elianna sifts Locket’s sand for a shard and finds nothing but cold grains. Flynry still carries a quarter-sized gem from the very first creature he met here, a minotaur made of sand that he cut in half the moment his sword appeared. The memory makes him smile at another one: Kenny’s gambling game on his first day, and Kenny’s voice shouting, “I’m not vaccinated!”

Their Majesties Request

Four armored guards close in. “I’m going to need you all to come with me.” Their crest matches the crystal atop the ziggurat, so these are royal guards, and the city, Cerys whispers, is run by a king and queen. “The land of the dead has a king and queen,” Flynry marvels. Their Majesties, the guard explains, simply wish to greet new arrivals; they like to keep tabs on the populace.

On the walk, Elianna interviews the guard leader. Everyone here died to get here, he confirms, and they’re “as happy as anyone can be anywhere.”

“Better to be alive here than nothing somewhere else.” — Bronn

He has been here for centuries. Time doesn’t really exist for him anymore: “I just am.” His name is Bronn, captain of the guard. In the sword’s reflection, he is small and burdened inside armor too heavy for him. Elianna immediately compliments his broad shoulders, and he admits that command was “thrust upon me, really.” When she nearly blurts out the sword’s secret, Flynry elbows her, and Bronn diagnoses the whole group with “sandsickness.”

The ziggurat’s door is hundreds of feet high. Inside, bridges cross a black chasm, tiny star-like motes drift through the air, and mirrors bounce celestial light into calming blue patterns around a glowing palace. Bronn stops at the bridge; his presence wasn’t requested. The party walks on into a blue-lit hall lined with courtiers, where two figures sit on two great thrones, waiting for them.

Notable Moments

• Flynry’s roar over Locket’s vanishing sand, which nearly turned Toddleheim into a werewolf.
• Toddleheim sees himself as the old wise wizard in the mirror, along with a vision of Locket’s hand on his shoulder, and learns to control his change.
• The arrow that killed Locket was fired by Cerys, the new character from the same player.
• Elianna the gentle librarian prays over two sleeping outlanders and then slits their throats.
• A whispered name opens a mirror of sand into Mortaurios, the city of the dead.
• Bronn, the reluctant captain, is a large armored man in person and “small and burdened” in the mirror.

Memorable Quotes

• Toddleheim: “They took her. I can’t believe things are gone.”
• Outlander archer: “We’ve got nothing else to do. Nothing but time here. Why not have a little fun?”
• Flynry: “My companion who you shot through the throat, despite your troubles, despite your pain, her death is yours.”
• Cerys: “I am sorry about your friend… I meant to kill one of them. They set me up.”
• Toddleheim: “She’s all right. I don’t like her, but she’s all right.”
• Flynry: “The land of the dead has a king and queen.”
• Elianna: “Sand scorpions, mean people. I’m really just a librarian. I didn’t get out much in my life.”
• Bronn: “After centuries, it all melds together. Time doesn’t really seem to exist for me anymore. I just am.”

Who and What Appears

Characters

Flynry (BdTeej). He has been in the Sands for years (“an eon”).

• He carries a greatsword with a mirror surface that shows a person’s true inner self. It manifested right after he killed his first sand creature, and it can burst into blue flame.
• He wears it on a backboard sheath with a cup for the point.
• He has a beast-like side (“primitive beast-like roots from the real world”) and partially shifted in grief.
• He can sometimes manipulate the sand, but uncontrollably.
• He keeps a quarter-sized soul gem fragment from the first sand minotaur.
• Toddleheim is “his best friend, number one.” He holds Cerys responsible for Locket’s death.
• He remembers Kenny’s gambling game from his first day.

Locket (Miss_Magitek). Killed by Cerys’s stray arrow through the throat; she turned to sand in Flynry’s arms. Elianna keeps her sand in a bag, and no soul shard was found.

Toddleheim (Ahnubyss). A dwarf “here.”

• Has a werewolf form, which he can now control at will after seeing his inner self in the mirror.
• His inner self is the old, wise, content wizard. He regained some youth from a magic item.
• He saw a mirage of Locket comforting him. He tolerates Cerys: “I don’t like her, but she’s all right.”

Elianna (ParallaxStella). A librarian who “didn’t get out much”.

• Says she “was sent here to protect you.”
• Keeps a notebook and sketches everything. Casts sleep.
• Killed two sleeping outlanders with a dagger, praying over each. Wants to go home.

Cerys (Miss_Magitek). An Aasimar (Scourge) with Radiant Consumption, a longsword and a shield.

• From “a part of” the Void long ago; she was killed and arrived in the Sands. Her friends here died and became sand.
• Seeks vengeance on whoever made this place and wants to return.
• Her inner self is angelic and white-winged.
• She knows the city’s name and how to summon its portal.
• Her arrow killed Locket.

Bronn. Captain of the royal guard of Mortaurios.

• Has been there “centuries”; time no longer exists for him. “New to command”, thrust upon him by their majesties.
• His reflection shows him small and burdened. He diagnoses “sandsickness.”

The outlanders. Four desert raiders who toyed with Cerys; she calls them “outlanders.”

• The archer with the heavy bow: decapitated by Flynry.
• The spear and javelin wielder: killed by Cerys.
• One in purple clothes: killed by Elianna.
• A Tabaxi with hand crossbows: killed by Elianna.
• All turned to sand.

Their Majesties. The king and queen of Mortaurios, who “keep tabs on the populace.” Seen only as two figures on thrones.

Kenny. Ran a gambling game on Flynry’s first day. Remembered voice: “I’m not vaccinated!”

The sand minotaur. The first creature Flynry met in the Sands; he cut it in half.

Places

• The Sands of Eternity: where the dead from the Void arrive. Death here is final; you become sand.
• Mortaurios (spelled “Moritorios”/“Moratorios” at the table).
  • A walled desert city on a miles-wide trapezoidal platform, reached by speaking its name in the desert.
  • Crowded bazaars, paved streets and a social hierarchy. No children, little wildlife.
• The ziggurat: the central pyramid with a crystal beaming light skyward. Inside, a chasm of bridges, floating star-motes and a mirror light system around a blue palace with a throne hall.
• The Void: named by Mudcat as the realms of the Dread Fortress, “an amalgamation of lost worlds.”

Items

• Flynry’s mirror greatsword.
• Elianna’s bag of Locket’s sand.
• Flynry’s quarter-sized soul gem.
• The outlander archer’s heavy bow.
• Soul gems: soul fragments used as currency, rumored to still hold souls and have arcane uses.
• The royal guard crest, shaped like the ziggurat’s crystal/gem.

Lore statements

• In the Sands, a person’s look reflects their inner self-image, and it can be controlled once understood (as Toddleheim did).
• The mirror sword shows inner selves.
• Arrows and objects remain after death; bodies become sand.
• Speaking Mortaurios’s name in the desert opens a mirror-like sand portal.
• “Better to be alive here than nothing somewhere else.”

Full Round-by-Round

Every beat of the episode, with timestamps (click to expand)

Part 10 “Shatter”: grief for Locket

1. 0:00:02 Recap: Flynry kneels in the desert under the celestial sky, holding out empty hands. Locket has just evaporated into sand in his arms after an arrow went through her throat.
2. 0:00:32 Flynry’s grief turns to rage. First comes shock at losing someone he holds dear, moments after finding her. Then comes the weight of how long he has been in this place, which “has done nothing but take, take, take” from him for what feels like an eon. As the last sand trickles through his fingers, he roars at the sky like a beast, “reminiscent to Toddleheim”, showing his “more primitive beast-like roots from the real world”. His body partly shifts. Toddleheim has seen this many times, and it is both comforting and frightening to him.
3. 0:02:10 Elianna, in shock, drops to her knees. She scoops Locket’s sand into the little bag at her side. “Maybe we can put her back together.” Because the sword “took her”, she throws handfuls of sand at Flynry’s sword to see if anything works.
4. 0:02:54 Toddleheim is stoic, then in pain. Flynry’s cry reverberates in his chest and he starts shifting into werewolf form: the hair lengthens, the jaw and snout elongate, and he cries the whole time.
5. 0:03:52 Elianna: “What the fuck is that?” She scrambles away from him.
6. 0:04:04 Flynry sees the bones shifting and Elianna’s fear. He runs at Toddleheim and holds him in a tight, restraining but loving embrace.
7. 0:04:58 Toddleheim’s knees start bending backwards and his voice warps: “They took her. I can’t believe things are gone.” The hug slows the change but doesn’t stop it.

Toddleheim looks into the sword

8. 0:05:58 Toddleheim is the only one who hasn’t looked into the sword. Flynry draws it and plants it in the ground with its mirror facing him.
9. 0:06:26 Mudcat asks for Toddleheim’s inner image of himself (“like the Matrix”). Ahnubyss answers that even after regaining some youth from a magic item, Toddleheim still sees himself as the old, wise wizard who has accomplished everything he wanted: content, satisfied and happy.
10. 0:07:37 In this place, having seen his inner truth in the mirror, Toddleheim can control the transformation at will and can shape his image however he sees himself inside.
11. 0:08:38 The reflection flickers between his real form and his inner self. He sees a mirage of Locket put her hand on his shoulder. He chooses not to fully transform, and his bones crunch back into place. Still crying, he hugs Flynry back.
12. 0:09:31 On a low Wisdom roll, Toddleheim only partly grasps it: Flynry looks different here and his own inner image was different, so how you look in this place “might be up to you.”
13. 0:10:32 Everyone rolls perception, and Ahnubyss rolls a nat 20. Elianna is still asking “What did she just see?” Nobody explains, so she writes it in her notebook. Flynry: “She watched a werewolf almost kill her, look into a mirror, and now two men are hugging.”

Flashback: Cerys (moments before Locket’s death)

14. 0:11:22 Mudcat rewinds time to just before Locket died and has Miss_Magitek describe her new character.
    • Cerys is an Aasimar, about six feet tall and ethereal-looking, with grayish skin and long blue hair tied back.
    • She wears heavy armor, tattered, worn and dull, over blue robes and vestments, and carries a blade and shield.
    • Her face is worn, without a smile: “jaded by this place.”
15. 0:13:08 Cerys is surrounded by four attackers with spears, swords and bows.
    • One large attacker rips away her shield.
    • Another pulls her sword away.
    • She dives for a nearby attacker’s hand crossbow on a nat 1, and a sword slashes across her back. Table panic: “She died?” “That was it. That was my character.”
16. 0:15:50 The attackers are toying with her. She goes for the crossbow again, and the archer puts an arrow through her wrist.
17. 0:16:28 The game. The archer laughs (“Maybe we should give her a fighting chance”) and throws his heavy bow at her feet with one arrow: “Go ahead, take your shot.” Cerys: “Is this a game to you?” Archer: “We’ve got nothing else to do. Nothing but time here. Why not have a little fun?” One of them walks over and flares his arms out, presenting himself as a target.
18. 0:18:20 Enraged, Cerys uses the Scourge Aasimar’s Radiant Consumption. She cries out in battle rage like a barbarian, and divine light radiates over all of them.
19. 0:19:10 She lets “the dice decide” whom she shoots. A d4 picks the man with his arms out. As she draws the heavy bow with immense force, another attacker stabs a spear through the back of her leg.
20. 0:20:33 The arrow goes wide over the man’s head and the next dune. It finds the back of Locket’s neck and pierces her throat. Miss_Magitek: “Oh my god. I killed my own character, okay?” The attacker pulls the spear out, and Cerys bleeds into the sand on her knees.

Over the dune

21. 0:21:21 Back to the present. Toddleheim remembers hearing a scream right before Locket died. Now he hears raw laughter just over the next dune. Through the shifting sand the party sees armed figures and someone kneeling and bleeding at the crest.
22. 0:23:19 Flynry looks for whoever could fire an arrow. The arrow that killed Locket is still lying at his feet; unlike Locket, it did not disappear. He spots:
    • a Tabaxi with hand crossbows;
    • a large, heavy bow at the feet of a glowing Aasimar, the kind of weapon that fired that arrow.
23. 0:24:08 Flynry makes a beeline for the glowing figure. The archer sees him coming: “Well, it looks like we’ve got some entertainment for the evening.” He slides in front of Cerys, grabs his bow back, nocks an arrow and trains it on Flynry.
24. 0:25:04 Toddleheim is right on his heels (“Flynry’s got blood in the water, I’m there”). Elianna clutches her pen and book and runs after them, because she does not want to be left alone.

The fight with the outlanders

25. 0:26:19 The spear-wielder steps back and throws a javelin at Flynry, who leads the charge. Flynry is torn between the glowing figure and the archer now holding the same bow. In the “new Flynry’s” cool calm, he ducks aside without breaking eye contact. The javelin flies between him and Toddleheim, past Toddleheim’s face. Elianna asks how tall Toddleheim is (“He’s not that tall”). Mudcat: “Toddleheim’s a dwarf here.” She was standing right behind him staring at the back of his head, and it misses her too.
26. 0:28:36 Elianna opens her book to the first spell she sees and casts sleep at 2nd level on all of them. Three attackers stumble and doze off one by one. The kneeling Cerys is unaffected, and so is the archer, who shrugs it off and keeps the bow on Flynry.
27. 0:30:58 Cerys spares the sleeping spear-wielder for now. She stands, still glowing, picks up her weapons and cuts deep into the archer with her longsword, adding radiant damage.
28. 0:33:45 Flynry, confused: the two people he thought were on the same team clearly aren’t.
29. 0:35:30 Flynry keeps his eyes locked on the radiant stranger (“you had the bow when I came up here”). But Toddleheim is “his best friend, number one”: if this is who they’re attacking, “this is who we’re fucking attacking.” He walks toward the burning man, who is still patting out flames. He breaks eye contact, throws the bow away, knocks the archer to his knees and takes his head off with the greatsword. “A full decap, double decap latte from Flynry.” The head rolls down the dune, and the body evaporates into sand, like Locket.
30. 0:38:10 Elianna rummages through her bag (“the toolkit from heaven”; “Mary Poppins’ purse out here in the desert”). She has crossbow bolts but no dagger. She takes the smallest dagger from the sleeping outlander in purple clothes. She was never trained with weapons. She whispers a basic prayer, grabs his face and slits his throat. His eyes shoot open and he gurgles blood up at her before turning to sand. She pats the ground: “Well, there’s two more left.”
31. 0:41:08 She walks to the sleeping Tabaxi, says “a nice little farewell prayer” and slits its throat too (Mudcat grants a bonus-action slice). It is the first time she has been violent. She looks at Flynry: “Eh?” Flynry nods, “yep.” Teej: “Our librarian’s a sociopath.” Mudcat: “War crimes it is.”
32. 0:42:45 Cerys glares at all of them. To the sleeping spear-wielder: “Oh, I’ve been waiting for you.” She drives her longsword through his chest. He convulses and half sits up, reaching for his spear, then freezes and turns to sand.
33. 0:44:17 Flynry wonders whether this stranger is somehow Locket. On a perception check he gets no sense of recognition. Unlike Toddleheim in werewolf form, she seems a different person.

Meeting Cerys

35. 0:45:26 Cerys jokes “I attack,” then sheathes her blade. She laughs: “You don’t look like outlanders… You’re not from here? From the city?” Flynry: “There are no cities here.” Cerys: “That tells me everything I need to know. There is indeed a city.” She thanks them and says of the outlanders scattering as sand: “They were not good people.” Toddleheim: “Well, you were lucky they attacked us first.”
36. 0:47:02 Flynry raises the greatsword at her: “Which one shot the arrow over the ridge? Tell me now.”
37. 0:47:26 Elianna runs between them. She asks whether the city has a pyramid and a crystal; Cerys says it does. Toddleheim’s bones crunch again in the background. Elianna to Flynry: “I know you’re angry and I was sent here to protect you, but that may be our only way out… do you take her as a prisoner of sorts?”
38. 0:48:25 Cerys: “I am no prisoner.” Flynry: “You could be a corpse instead.” Cerys: “I’d like to see you try.” Blue flame engulfs Flynry’s sword.
39. 0:48:49 Elianna pleads that Cerys knows of a city Elianna saw through the sword: “I’m not saying that we spare her life at the end.” She is terrified: both of them are glowing, a werewolf is forming behind her, and “I wanna fucking go home.” Flynry waves Toddleheim, in werewolf form, up beside him. Cerys: “I’m not afraid of you.” She cracks her neck. Elianna steps aside.
40. 0:49:55 Cerys’s account: the outlanders surrounded her, threw a crossbow (bow) at her feet, and “I let the fates decide which one I should shoot.” They stabbed her as she fired, and she isn’t proficient with such weapons.
41. 0:50:35 Flynry: “Pain in your leg isn’t gonna bring Locket back… My companion who you shot through the throat, despite your troubles, despite your pain, her death is yours.” Cerys: “I am sorry about your friend… I meant to kill one of them. They set me up.” Flynry turns his back and walks away.
42. 0:51:31 Cerys tells the others she knows the pyramid, “in fact, a ziggurat”, and is trying to get back there. “My name is Cerys.”
43. 0:52:40 Toddleheim, drooling and very tall in werewolf form, walks right up to her face: “I don’t care who you are.” He walks off, transforming back as he goes.
44. 0:53:03 Cerys offers Elianna help. Elianna: “They’re just heartbroken right now.” Cerys: “I have lost people here as well. I’ve seen them turn into sand and float into nothing… I have wanted to seek vengeance on whomever made this place.” She doesn’t know who made it yet and is trying to find out.
45. 0:54:24 How to reach the city: “You need only speak the name in this desert, in this wasteland, and it will take you there.” Elianna gestures for her to write it in the book so she can’t say it and leave alone. Cerys writes the name, “Moritorios” (Mortaurios, spelling per the YouTube title), and tells her: “whisper that into the wind.”
46. 0:56:04 Flynry, petty but listening, turns his back so the sword on it points at Cerys, and signals Toddleheim to look into it. Toddleheim sees her inner self: still an Aasimar, but angelic and vibrant, with radiant hair, bright skin, bright blue eyes (now dark gray), and white wings. “That former self of hers.”
47. 0:59:03 Toddleheim, shocked but still angry: “I think we can trust her… At the very least, I’ll just get Elianna home.” Flynry: “As soon as we ditch her, this one gets to, I’m gonna…” Toddleheim: “You can see whatever’s left, I promise.” “Is that a promise?” Flynry rejoins the group.
48. 1:00:08 The portal. Cerys blows sand from her palm and says the name. The whisper echoes and amplifies across an infinite distance. The sand swirls into a portal that looks first like a mirror showing their reflections. Then it shows them standing at the foot of great stairs before a walled city, with the massive ziggurat Elianna saw before, topped by a crystal shooting a beam of light into the sky. In a blink they are on the other side, watching their reflections in the desert as the portal dissipates.

Part 11 “Mortaurios”: the city

49. 1:03:50 They stand at the foot of the walled city.
    • A huge trapezoidal platform stretches for miles, built like the bottom third of a pyramid.
    • A second, massive ziggurat rises in its center (“a ziggurat on top of a ziggurat”).
    • A large gate stands at the top of the steps. Elianna hastily takes notes.
50. 1:05:18 Elianna, still wary of Toddleheim, shows Flynry her earlier sketch: “Well, she wasn’t lying. This is the place.” Teej: “the brothers grumpy.”
51. 1:05:54 Flynry asks how Cerys found it. Cerys: “I found somebody else from the city, similar to how you all found me, and they brought me here… there are many different people here.” She has never been to the ziggurat and offers to go with them. She is trying to return somewhere.
52. 1:07:06 Teej asks the DM what their home world is called. Mudcat: the plane of the Dread Fortress and all its realms is “an amalgamation of lost worlds… simply just called the Void.” In character:
    • Flynry: “Did you come from the Void?” Cerys: “From a part of it, yes. A long time ago.”
    • Toddleheim: “And so you were killed.” Cerys: “Yes, that is how I found myself here.”
    • Flynry: “We too were killed and arrived here.”
53. 1:08:01 Cerys: “If you die here, there is no coming back. You become sand.” She grew close to people here, they were killed, and now she is alone: “I would like to return.” Flynry: “We’re no strangers to loss.” He looks to Toddleheim for judgment. Toddleheim nods: “She’s all right. I don’t like her, but she’s all right.”
54. 1:09:56 Flynry tries his sand-manipulation power inside the city. It doesn’t work. Over the years it has worked only arbitrarily, outside his control (that is how the “sword truth” came to him).
55. 1:11:15 The city.
    • It is a bustling, dusty desert metropolis of tents and bazaars, crowded with thousands of people buying, selling, drinking, eating and repairing buildings. The streets are paved.
    • For Flynry, after years of wandering, it is almost unfathomable, and “mundane in a way.”
    • The green hue of the desert fades here into normal sandstone tones in the ziggurat’s light.
    • No creatures are made of sand. Buildings use sand as a material (clay and the like) alongside wood and stone, but nothing is “ethereally made out of magic sand.” “Makes Flynry uncomfortable. Just when you think you know a place.”

Soul gems

56. 1:14:52 Cerys asks about currency. Her history check recalls what she was told before:
    • People trade some precious metals, but mostly soul gems: shaped, polished or rough-cut.
    • They are found in the sand where individuals have ceased to be alive. They are fragments of people’s souls that weren’t completely obliterated into sand.
    • They have been gathered over “the hundreds and thousands of years” this place has existed (how long is unknown). People break them up and barter with them.
    • There are whispers that the gems still contain the souls and can be used in arcane ways, and some people collect them for that reason.
57. 1:17:28 Cerys tells the group only that the best way to shop is collecting gems, “sometimes left in fragments of people who have died”, and notes the outlanders left none.
58. 1:18:00 Elianna sifts the bag of Locket’s sand for a shard and rolls a nat 1. It feels like a bag of cold sand. She shakes her head at Flynry, and he nods.
59. 1:20:15 Flynry’s gem. On a history check, Flynry remembers his very first moments here, many years ago, “as your dream, your vision… was shattered.”
    • The first creature he met was a large minotaur made of sand. He sliced it in half right after his greatsword first manifested.
    • Where it dissipated he found a quarter-sized gem fragment and clung to it as “anything that isn’t sand.” He still has it.
    • He tosses and catches it and shows it to Cerys. Cerys: “You could probably get something pretty good with that… usually it’s about how well you’re able to barter.”
60. 1:23:30 Flynry smiles to himself, remembering Kenny’s gambling game on his very first day: he put jewelry on the line, lost it, and had to intimidate his way into getting it back. In his memory he hears Kenny’s voice: “I’m not vaccinated!” (speaker uncertain).

The royal guard

61. 1:24:06 Four armored, militaristic people approach with weapons drawn. A larger man in the back says: “I’m going to need you all to come with me.” Cerys: “Is there a reason…? You have a warrant of sorts?”
62. 1:25:12 Cerys recognizes the crest on his armor, the same shape as the gem/crystal atop the ziggurat. These are the royal military guards. “There’s no demands being made here. Simply a request from their majesties.” Cerys: “We should probably comply… if we don’t comply, we will be [in danger].”
63. 1:26:02 Flynry defers to Elianna as the diplomat. Elianna: “Are we in trouble?” Guard: “Their Majesties simply wish to greet you upon your arrival… Their Majesties do like to keep tabs on the populace.”
64. 1:27:21 Toddleheim shoots Cerys a dark, irritated “what have you led us into” glance: “Seems good.” Cerys whispers that the city is run by a king and queen, “not really tyrants from what I know of.” Flynry: “The land of the dead has a king and queen.” Elianna: “Please lead the way.” The guards sheathe their weapons and lead them.
65. 1:29:36 Flynry notes the route. Closer to the ziggurat the buildings grow nicer, with columns and ornate decoration, and some look governmental, maintained by the monarchy. There is a clear hierarchy and system of order. Wildlife is notably sparse (an occasional rat or small creature, one or two horses). There are no children.

Bronn

66. 1:31:48 Elianna walks beside the guard leader.
    • Elianna: “Did they all die at one point?” Guard: “Yes, that is how one comes to find themselves in the sands of eternity.”
    • Elianna: “And they’re happy here?” Guard: “As happy as anyone can be anywhere… Better to be alive here than nothing somewhere else.”
    • Elianna: “Are you happy?” Guard: “Getting a little personal, but… Yes, I’m comfortable in my station.”
    • Elianna: “Sand scorpions, mean people. I’m really just a librarian.” Guard: “You won’t find many libraries here. Maybe one or two. Odd to make books of sand.”
    • How long has he been here? He looks down at his shield: “After centuries, it all melds together. Time doesn’t really seem to exist for me anymore. I just am.”
67. 1:34:21 Flynry wants to know whether the city looks different in the sword. Teej describes the sheath: a cup for the point and a backboard with belt straps, so most of the mirror surface stays exposed. Toddleheim walks behind and glances into it. The buildings look the same. People show slight variations (younger, happier, different hair), the way they see themselves inside.
68. 1:38:13 Elianna notices and waves Flynry up. The guard gives his name: “My name is Bronn… I am the captain of the guard.” Elianna starts suggesting Flynry show Bronn the sword. Flynry elbows her and brags it’s just “quite an impressive great sword”; Elianna “loves it.” Elianna, glaring: “Sorry, I guess it’s just a normal stupid sword after all.” Bronn: “I’ve seen a sword before.” He mutters “Sandsickness” as if it were a normal diagnosis.
69. 1:40:13 The ziggurat.
    • It is an immense enclosed pyramid that seems to touch the sky, with a door hundreds of feet high.
    • A slit-like opening glows with pleasant bluish-green light.
    • The city slopes upward from all sides to its base.
70. 1:42:11 At an overlook, Flynry turns his back (and the sword) toward Bronn and asks where he lives, so Elianna can look. In the reflection Bronn is much smaller. His armor is too large and heavy for him, and his posture is dragged down, tired and sad: “small and burdened.”
71. 1:44:34 Elianna fake-coughs and grabs him: “Oh, your shoulders are so broad. You’re so strong.” Bronn: “I’m rather new to command. It’s kind of thrust upon me, really. Not something I would have chosen, but when their majesties call, you answer. At least I do.” Elianna flatters him further. Flynry shoots a look at Toddleheim and Cerys. Bronn: “How long were you out there?” Elianna blames the abrasive sand. Cerys: “Causes hallucinations sometimes, a lot of brain fog.” Bronn: they’ll all have a chance to rest soon.
72. 1:46:26 Inside the ziggurat.
    • It is a cavernous, mostly empty space. Bridges run in many directions over a chasm that drops hundreds of feet into pitch black and sand.
    • At its center stands a beautiful palace glowing in blues.
    • Tiny floating “stars”, sand-like in size, twinkle in the air. They have a slight physical presence, like walking through bubbles or floating sand.
    • Holes in the ziggurat’s top let in light from the celestial bodies. A series of mirrors bounces that light into geometric patterns and great glowing balls of ghostly blue light. The effect is calming, “like… those blue street lights in cities… to calm people down.”
73. 1:49:43 The guards stop at the bridge: “Through there you’ll find their majesties waiting for you.” Flynry: “You’re not coming then?” Bronn: “No. My presence wasn’t requested.”
74. 1:50:52 The throne hall. Past the palace’s opening lies a grand hall lit blue by the mirrors. Two large thrones sit at the end with two figures in them. Servants move about and a court lines the aisle. The figures await the party’s approach. The file ends at 1:53:02.