Planar Prison was not as fun as Sal had expected.
She was cold, had a nasty couple of bruises, and she was hungry. Her companion, deprived of the warmth of the sun and the trees of her forest, was doing little better, and the dryad stared glumly at one of the stone walls that contained the huddled pair. The bobbling creatures that Sal had once summoned were however in far higher spirits. While the wizard and dryad sat shivering in the cold darkness, the diminutive monsters were busy hunting the alarmingly large insects that made their home in the depressing cell.
The woven collar of metal fastened around Sal's neck was heavy and buzzed with an arcane energy. It dug into the soft skin on the sides of her neck, reminding her of her bondage, and her imprisonment. But mostly, it reminded her of the fact that she couldn't manage much more than a cantrip without feeling like she'd run the better part of a marathon. She could feel how the cursed item stunted and constrained her magic. Her only coalescence was that the Warden hadn't managed to figure out how to enslave her with his strange magic, at least not yet.
Sal had lost track of how long she and her fellow travelers had been
honored guests of the enigmatic cambion that called himself the Warden. She'd known it was a risk to take a shortcut between between the Astral and Ethereal planes. It wasn't the first time Sal had ended up in some uncharted plane of existence. And it certainly was the first time she had ended up chains. However, it usually didn't take so long to figure out a way to escape. The collection of thralls and hunters serving the warden were a problem. A problem she had no desire of addressing so long as she lacked the ability to summon a suitable protector.
Sal was contemplating whether the tasteless gruel of the day would be as tasteless as it had been every other day when a bright, perfectly marvelous orb in silver appeared in front of her. It was an amusing trick of magic, managing to send a small thing like that sailing across the planes, that caused the young wizard to smile despite her dour surroundings. Her companion watched warily as Sal grasped the orb and it was replaced by a wax sealed piece of parchment. As she read the letter, the young wizard could not help but laugh. It was a job. Bain had managed to send an orb across the stormy sea of the Astral plane just to tell her that she had a job to do.
The letter was enough.
Salem. Ancient magic and great ley lines still coursed through that place. It would be a fine enough conduit to the material plane. Probably. If not, well, the young conjurer reasoned then it would at least send them somewhere less gloomy. She tried to imagine Salem, Salem as it presently was, and not as it was centuries ago. Sal hummed quietly to herself as she wove her magic around the curse of the collar that still restrained her, taking care not to push against the powerful magic that had forged the strange object. She had just managed it, feeling the wave of arcane energy surrounding her, when the dryad snatched the parchment from her hand and clasped her hands between her own.
"No! Sal, please, you promised. Home, I want to go home."
Sal felt a pang of guilt gnaw at her heart. Promises were promises. The darkness hit her as she gave in, and altered the destination of the spell at the last minute. And when she opened her eyes, they were back in the forest, and the dryad was standing over her. Her long, leaf-green hair once more full of life and blossoming flowers.
"You could have gotten us killed, Sal!" She shouted, down at her, pulling away the hand that had been softly stroking Sal's hair until then.
"Meera, please, we were guests, at worst they'd only torture us a bit," Sal suggested as she rose, nursing one hell of a headache. She did not quite believe herself. Cambions were a notoriously dangerous sort to socialize with.
Jabbing a finger angrily and repeatedly into the middle of Sal's chest, the dryad's voice was full of disappointment, which hurt Sal the most, "You'll always be a two-bit punk. You'll always be like this. I'm done. I'm out. Go lose yourself to the planes on your own. Vanish into the darkness, but keep me out of it!"
"I'm sorry, Meera, I know," Sal whispered, wrapping the sobbing women in her arms. "This was dumb. I miscalculated. I didn't think they'd catch us. It was just supposed to be an adventure. It should —"
"Just go!" Meera shouted, pushing Sal forcefully away. Her touch was full of power, far more than the lithe woman seemed capable of channeling. Sal could feel the earth beneath her move, and the trees surrounding her no longer looked so friendly."I wash my hands of you Sally Lou. You're not welcome in my domain any more."
Sal rose slowly to her feet. She blinked away the tears that threatened to spill past the edges of her eyes and opened her mouth to speak, only to find that there were not words to say. She couldn't fix it. She couldn't say the anything to make things right. It hurt. She hated herself in that moment. She knew. She knew she'd never see the dryad again. She'd never walk through her forest again. She'd never laugh with her again. She'd never feel—
"Let's go, Gir," Sal finally managed, leading the troop of bobbling creatures back through a familiar portal lodged in an ancient oak tree. The quiet sobbing of the dryad accompanied her back to the material plane.
Sal had suspected that she would be late.
Timeliness had never been her strong suit. Traveling between did strange things to one's sense of time. Across the many planes minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and even years shifted in meaning and moved at paces that had little to do with the predictable passage of time on the prime plane. Dimension doors, teleportation circles, and Sal's personal favorite, shifting across the astral planes would have been far more efficient and comfortable methods of travel than Delta Air Lines. However, such things usually took time, deep wells of arcane energy, and often a sacrifice or two, depending on the user. There was no time, Bain had said he'd wasted enough time trying to find her. And Sal had a gut feeling that she'd be needing her reserve of magical energy soon enough. It wasn't the usual supernatural errand job that she so loved, that had caused Bain to look for her across the arcane planes. No, he was desperate. And any affect in one of her employers, much less desperation, was never a good sign. It lead her to surmise that she'd actually have to earn her pay check for once.
Bain hadn't even let her have an artifact to use as a glorified battery to power a rush-job teleportation. He said she had to be discreet. He was the worst.
Of course, being discreet didn't mean that she couldn't use some small magic, the sort of magic that would be hidden by all the magic that had always existed in Salem. She wasn't going to hail a cab or rent some car, that wasn't very wizardly. Instead, Sal found herself battering with a spectral raven, trading the feather of strange, impossibly colorful bird for passage through through an elemental realm of air. It was windy. Very Windy. And in between dodging bolts of lightening that thundered from the endless clouds, Sal was very grateful for her warm sweater.
Sal appeared a short distance from the house, striding onto the scene from within a small cloud of black feathers that faded into nothingness. She counted five figures. She was definitely late. She would blame Bain. Despite the thick sweater that she wore she shivered. There was magic, heavy magic in the air. The sort of magic that accompanied grim deeds and ill tidings.
The fading remains of a cigarette were her right hand and a heavy leather briefcase was in her left hand that she was carrying with noticeable effort. The contingent of tiny extraplanar monsters that she had stuffed in between layers of clothing and arcane knickknacks was heavier than she'd thought. The masquerade had to be preserved, mundane mortals didn't react well to the bobbling things she commanded, but all the same, she wasn't going to go in without backup. She could have sworn that she heard the strange creatures grumbling from deep within the suitcase. She hoped the bottle of whiskey she had provided them with wasn't already empty.
Hefting the heavy leather briefcase onto the ground in front of her, Sal offered her most winning smile as a chorus of unintelligible curses escaped her bag, "Hi, I'm Sal, your resident wizard."
Fading Memory