Slowly the voices nearby pierced the consciousness of the fair-skinned man in the robe and he began to stir. He picked up his head and glanced around. This was clearly not the valley outside of Kyranholm where he was pretty sure he’d last been. He sat up straighter, rubbed his eyes, and looked around yet again. The greenery, the running water, all that felt right. Right? No, no it’s quite wrong. He looked at it again. That is not the same creek, those are not the same trees. And these are not the mercenaries I was with before.


Dacheus Zaraphiston buried his face in his hands and tried to focus, to think. How did he get here? It made no sense. Had he done something wrong? He retraced his steps as best he could. He had been in the valley, right? And he was testing out a new spell, a combination of teleportation with misdirection. Rather than just creating an illusory duplicate of himself while turning invisible, he was actually going to teleport out of harm’s way at the same time. It should have worked. He had mastered both spells, mashing them together shouldn’t have been a problem, right?


Apparently it had.


[i]Ok, think. Valley. Mercenaries. Spell. Soo… what went wrong? [/i]He straightened up and looked around again. [i]This is sooo not the valley. Where in the nine hells am I? Did something go wrong? Is this one of my illusions?[/i] He looked at a rock next to him and tried to see through it. It remained where it was, refusing to yield. He rapped his knuckles against it. Still it remained solid. He picked it up and inspected it closely. Sure looks real. For good measure, he bonked it against his forehead. [i]Ouch. Ok, that was stupid. It’s real.[/i] 


Dacheus set the rock down and stood up. [i]Is this my fault? No, it can’t be, I’m not bleeding. But how else… no. Just no. Not my fault.[/i] He surveyed the room once more. [i]Right?[/i]


With the initial shock wearing off, he tried to get his bearings. He was indoors, it was reasonably warm, there were trees and water and other people and none of it made sense. He looked down at himself. Everything was still where it belonged. Wizard’s robe, spellbook in its bag on his back. Arcane tools and trinkets in the pockets of his robe. Still fully dressed, unlike his first teleportation mishap that had left him naked in the city square. [i]Thank the gods for invisibility.[/i]


And then there was the matter of the other people. Two men, already up, and an unconscious half-elven woman, by the looks of it. [i]Well, could be a man, hard to tell with the elves.[/i] Regardless, they weren’t the marauding band he’d been working with over the last month. He wouldn’t really miss them, but it was nice to be appreciated.


He turned and looked at the two men. “Gentlemen. Do you know where we are?” he asked calmly, bronze eyes flicking between the two. One was large and confident. The other was small and terrified. Dacheus would fit somewhere in between, in both senses.