Tanith dips a big hand into the mythical water bringing a mouthful to his lips.
"Bottoms up."
As the waters trickle onto Astraden's tongue, her words suddenly fall away.
So does the rest of the world. The six adventurers watch the world blur like a watercolor painting left out in the rain, until the only solid shapes are each other, Clunk, and winding golden threads that form around their wrists. These threads trail off into the distance, and the adventurers find their vision fuzzes and blurs whenever they try to follow a thread's length farther than a few feet from their bodies.
Pull the thread and wait seven seconds, and you shall be returned to your own time.
Everyone is suddenly overwhelmed by the rush of alien yet strangely familiar memories. The blurry world around them swirls away into a vortex of lightning and wind, fire and rain, ending in the utter darkness of nothingness. They only float adrift in this silence for a few moments, but it's still long enough to feel the cold perpetuity of the infinite weighing down.
Suddenly, they find themselves standing on a windy bluff overlooking an immense and lush canyon. Trees grow right up to the canyon’s rim, and far to the south, the faint, looming specter of a pale mountain is visible.
The din of distant battle finds the heroes' ears, and as if rising from the ground on ledges and mesas both near and far, armies of creatures fade into view. In the distance, cities smoke in ruin, and the sky is cast with a dark pallor.
The cacophonous moans of the undead ride the wind, and in the distance, the PCs can see huge numbers of humanoids battling against what seems like an endless wave of the dead.
Creatures Spiny's Six has faced before are here in legions—spawn of Kyuss of all shapes and sizesm wormcallers, morhgs, eviscerator beetles, overworms, and ulgurstastas like the Apostle of Kyuss who nearly overtook the Free City Arena. Yet there are other, stranger creatures as well. Enormous worm-dripping centipedes cause the ground they walk on to steam and bubble and boil like hot pokers plunged into ice. Immense black scorpions' mere presence seems to turn the living on their allies. Horrific worm-like dragons breathe out swaths of writhing green Kyuss worm swarms upon their prey.
And wheeling in the distant skies above many miles away, attended by numerous smaller dragons, soars a titanic shape—a skeletal red dragon of horrifying size.
Dragotha.
Cuetzpalli is awed at the sight of so much battle.
"Bruh..."
His exclamation seems almost involuntary. His jaw hangs a slack. His hand flies subconsciously to the hilt of Kelmarchen as the war-song rises within him.
Astraden looks similarly shocked. She looks up at the sun, trying to gauge the time, the season, but shakes her head in confusion. There are no reliable landmarks here. Her eyes get big.
"The druids didn't say anything about this being safe. I think we're really in the past. This is crazy. No one get merced or lost back here, all right?"
"...oh."
Carina can do little but observe the scene in a mix of horror and awe.
"...that's...that's a lot of baddies."
"The druids didn't say anything about this being safe. I think we're really in the past. This is crazy. No one get merced or lost back here, all right?"
"...and nobody become your own great-great-great grandparent, because it's gross and makes family reunions really confusing!" Eben adds, as an addendum to the standard time travel rules. "I guess this is where/when Dragotha hides her phylactery? So we're just here to see that? So we don't have to, like, fight the entire Kyuss army of doom?"
"I guess so. Kind of unfair for them to send us back here just to fight their old wars for them and die. Though, if they did that to all the adventurers that came in search of the Library, it might be kinda effective."
Astraden begins layering protective and enhancing spells over herself and her comrades. "I do think we should be ready for a fight, though. Wouldn't surprise me if some of those worm things could teleport."