94828-2 RAA Outer Seas TEXT R1 Proof

The Outer Seas

The Elapso D eep in the coral forests of the Outer Seas are vast sunken temple com plexes long abandoned by their original creators. Now they are home to the serpentine merfolk known as the Elapso. I first learned about these reclusive and mysterious merfolk from a deck guard named Malick, who had spent a few years sailing on pearl diving crews that frequented one of the great coral jungles of Ryn. As the story goes, eleven months into their expedition, the divers discovered a massive abandoned city at least one hundred feet below the waves. Malick was not an expert diver and needed to use one of the enchanted dive bands the magus captain supplied so the crew could stay down for longer than a few minutes. But some of the more seasoned divers, with the aid of minor ensorcellments, were able to stay down for hours at a time. Those who could spend more time below the waves were tasked to explore this sunken city, and when they surfaced, they told stories of a place that seemed long abandoned by whatever advanced hands had carved it. The cobbled streets and strange statues were overgrown with coral, and an abundance of venomous coral snakes made farming the oyster beds that had taken root in the ruins even more difficult. The magus who was acting captain on the voyage started taking an interest in the sunken city and spent many long dives exploring the drowned temples and bringing up various artifacts. One of those artifacts was a jeweled scepter of coral and precious stones that the magus said allowed him to read any writing, simply by holding the thing and looking upon the words scrawled on the page. Apparently, this scepter could even allow the magus to read the strange glyphs on the sunken temple walls, giving him insight into a whole civilization built around guarding a library vault supposedly full of ancient and powerful arcane secrets. The captain would dive day after day, and even when the ship’s holds were overflowing with pearls and oyster meat, the captain brushed off all questions about leaving. Instead, he would slip back below the waves and continue to explore the ancient submerged city. Nearly two months after they had set anchor, the ship was still sitting above the sunken city, and while there were more than enough sea snakes and oyster meat to feed the crew—so much so that the oyster meat that had been procured for trade had begun to turn even with the aid of the cold rock bindings on the holds—the magus continued his daily dives. He was seemingly oblivious to the restlessness of the crew and their desire to move on to other waters, but as mutiny is seen by most on the Outer Seas as the highest of crimes, mutiny was not on deck. That is until one of the most experienced pearl divers, an orc named Bill Silvertooth, disturbed by the magus’s increasingly strange behav ior, decided to collect the bands of breath from the other divers, and set out to follow the magus to see what kept him anchored to the sunken city and its grand temples. After the magus set off on another dive deep into the heart of one of the temples, Bill followed, and—as he relayed to Malick, who relayed it to me—he said the magus took many twists and turns, descending deeper and deeper into the dark waters of the sunken temple. After nearly an hour’s worth of swimming, he came upon a vast opening,

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