Book One -- A Gathering of Dreams

Chapter Eleven:  On the Shores of a Great Sea

            On the beach by the huge silvery moon, the travelers take off, Singh and Saphir together on Shrek who begrudgingly takes both riders.  Karambi leads.  She begins to once again shift shadow --  more slowly and cautiously this time -- towards Dworkin (we all presume and hope).
            After a few hours a shadow with a large white city materializes.  It has many buildings of marble and granite.  A large bay with docks and piers lines the city side.  The tech has definitely dropped, the shadow seems insular with a high very-specific type of magic quality about its nature.  They note that it is harder for the dragons to be/exist -- physically -- in this shadow.  The dragons' do a test breathe, at Toeval's request, and the result is a gas emission that caused them to drop rapidly.  So the test was quickly stopped.  Then Toeval fired his gun and it wouldn't even click.
            It's night time and the city is lit up and very active, lit up by oil lamps nd crowded with people in the streets. The group flies over the city, noticing a large mansion type structure.  They continue flying in a roundabout scouting way, looking to size up the landside and search out a forested landing space beyond the city.
            The line where people stop and it's just barren forest and mountains is pretty sharp and sudden. Some of the unpopulated mountains rise into the atmosphere!
            They don't really find one close at hand, so they take the surrounding terrains' measure and then circle back and dive into the water, the dragons transforming so that they can shark them up to the pier.
              Nero looks for a berth but all is full, so Riden and Sor take a dinghy out to bribe someone to move so that their boat can set in.  They find someone that takes money and pulls out.  As the boat leaves Nero offers to buy the boat -- the man says that it isn't for sale and that the captain isn't here and that his father would have his hide.  Nero says that can be compensated for as well.  They agree on 3000 as the price and Nero instructs him to wait to here from him.
              Saphir does a sense of the town and get a strange read, the town has a gradation of varying power levels that really fills out and ascends well roundly up to supreme and unknown power levels, not just in a one off spike but quite fully!! At that it also feels familiar  in some very reminiscent way. The people are in the middle of some form of Carnival and are thinner and taller and paler than Amberites. In the city there are some weapons on some of the folk.
              Nero docks, and leaves right away to find Dworkin, with his foursome in tow. Nero makes his way, stops and uses the jewel(ghost) to tell him that the castle is his destination.  He calls up the Pattern and uses a Pattern lens on the castle, which makes him quite nauseous.
            Saphir tracks Riden, who he knows/sense quite well by now, and uses this to track Nero.
              Saphir and the others mingle well with the revelers and partiers, especially Ekin who gets some kissing and feeling along the way, and -- of course -- booze. And so does Singh, who starts copping a feel wherever she can including Saphir,  Ekin and Toeval. Toeval left the dragons in water and air at the ready, but out of sight.
              Nero makes his way to the castle, via a few guards that he kills and/or takes over. Once on the left path he moves roundabout the castle grounds, encountering a group of wraiths and other beasties, a banshee but he keeps powering forward.
            Eventually he attracts the attention of the Faerie lord Chantra.  They spare with words and Chantra calls a faerie hunt down on Nero and releases the wards of the castle.  Nero and his guards are swarmed by wraiths.  He uses a sphere or radius of psyche to keep the things at bay, but all of his guards except Riden are killed.
            He eventually retreats to a closed structure/room where there are many troops and a powerful being he can't sense and a sorcerer.  As he lays plans against getting in, he is assaulted by a wraith that he psychically forces down the chimney of the place he is near the door of.  The wraith dissolves on touching the entry portal of the chimney.
            Six different riders of the faerie hunt come out of the wooded darkness at him, some he holds off, but some he gets knocked around by. At just about that point he is approached by an emissary, a woman of power...
              The group attempts to scan the crowd but everyone is pretty drunk, and all watch the fireworks of symbols like the unicorn, the serpent etc.  Saphir and Singh think they are symbols of the makers work and or his cohorts??  Or something like that.
            They spot some will o'wisp type beings as they reach the castle.  Saphir orders the first guard to take them in ala psyche.  But when they reach the mesmerized guard near the blood stains at the castle gate, he is more messed with already.  Singh takes him out -- unnoticeably -- as Saphir ensures that the street guard doesn't notice anyway.
            They make their way in, sense the wraiths' and other guardians' activity off to the left, so they start to veer off to the center path which leads straight up to the main castle.
            Saphir stands on the path that Nero took, trying to sense his situation, knowing through Riden's intense pain that trouble has befallen them... and trying to decide whether he should go after him.  Singh and Toeval persuade him to leave Nero to his own plight and move forward.  Saphir resistantly gives in. Toeval tries to send/summon the dragons, but can't.
            Later, he moves outside the gateway entrance and successfully calls them to come fly close by and be ready.  They move up the path and pass the great rectangular pool that has no bottom to it and has lots of powerful activity in it.  They steer as clear of it as they can.  They come to a main building with two great doors.
            They go in and behold a party in a great open room that resembles the chambers royal in Amber. At the party, there are many revelers of a much higher class.  Saphir sweeps the room with sense and picks up two handfuls of powerful beings and the sense that reality felt like mirrors of several realities with no objective reality.
            As Saphir scanned, the beings shielded and disappeared and when Saphir asked for Dworkin, the revelers all laughed. They all seemed like the light of the reflections shined and the group seemed the most or only substantial things.  Saphir pulled back in very tight to created a type of white noise defensive field around his friends and himself.
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