The party scrambled ashore after the RNS Coaltongue blasted a hole in the magical defenses of the Governor’s island. The island was largely deserted except for a fortified keep in the center of the island, and a glowing structure surrounded by yet ANOTHER field of energy floated above the keep.
The party battled it’s way inside, fighting past incarnations of Roland Stanfield, and convincing squads of Risuri soldiers to stand down. When trying to access the giant staircase leading to the upper levels of the keep, the stairs turned out to be Stover Delft’s worst nightmare: a giant mimic!
After defeating the mimic, the party found the source of the mysterious electrical shield surrounding the floating structure above the keep: Stover Delft. It turns out that agents of the king have a small amount of power from the Rites of Rulership infused within them, and Roland Stanfield had Stover Delft hooked up to an arcanoscience machine that turned this energy into a protective barrier for his ritual upstairs. Unfortunately, the party was unable to disengage Stover from this device, and it ended up killing him. With his death, though, the shield was down to the floating structure.
Having just witnessed the death of a longtime boss, mentor, and friend, the party made it’s way up on to the surface of the floating structure. There they found Roland Stanfield, along with 5 of his past life incarnations. A 60 ft lighthouse beamed energy into the sky, pulling down stars in it’s wake. There were 8 other lanterns associated with different planar energies trained on the lighthouse.
Long story short, though extremely difficult, the party managed to kill Roland Stanfield’s incarnations, but not without Gerard falling to the poison of a prismatic spray. When the last lantern light was taken off of the lighthouse, Stanfield’s ritual ended and he lost all power.
CUT SCENE
When Stanfield is finally cut down, or when the lighthouse is snuffed, he coughs and clutches his back as he collapses. Blood pools around him, and his skin drains of color, but he looks skyward as his eyes darken with death.
“You might have saved Risur,” he says, “but Nicodemus will complete the ritual on Axis Island. It was a grand folly. Not my folly, though. Yours. Death has not stopped me before, and I swear even if the whole nation resists, it will not stop me now.”
He smiles and releases a dying breath. Everything is growing steadily brighter, lit from above, as a falling star approaches. The star Mishados (named after an incarnation of Srasama), strikes the rooftop, dealing 100 damage to everyone, yet miraculously leaving everyone at 1 hit point. Everyone but Stanfield, that is; the party sees that he had already began to be reborn as a Rakshasa, but was stabbed through the heart with shards from the meteorite, killing him instantly. . . and forever.
When the dust clears, the sky overhead is no longer dotted with a field of stars, but instead glows with the uneven haze of a charcoal nebula. A mere handful of stars wander the night, and skyseers recognize their energy as matching the lanterns of the lighthouse.
A bright golden glow rises in the air on the western horizon, then fades a few minutes later. It isn’t until more than an hour later that the entire world rumbles with a deafening sound like an explosion, sweeping in from the same direction. A quick calculation of the speed of sound supports any guesses that the explosion occurred on Axis Island.
Any surviving Danoran ships flee, many of them pulled into the deep by She Who Writhes before the kraken withdraws to the wider sea. Atop Cauldron Hill stormclouds gather, but instead of falling rain, the mountain itself starts to erode and float upward, mote by mote.
Flint holds its breath, wondering what the new day will bring. But hours pass, and when the sun should rise, instead the world is greeted only by a patch of the cloudy sky somewhat less dark. The haze there seems to churn ever so slowly, like two gears—immeasurably titanic to be visible at this cosmic distance—grinding between their teeth the heavens themselves.
The new age has dawned.